Literacy

In kindergarten, we focus on building a strong literacy foundation. Students are involved in a variety of lessons and activities on a daily basis that may include:phonemic and phonological awareness, the relationship between letters and their sounds, phonics, decoding strategies, sight words, comprehension, fluency, story elements, letter formation, and writing conventions.

Wow! I work with the whole class, in small guided reading/writing groups as well as with individual children. In this way, I can differentiate our instruction to meet the specific needs of our students. We use songs, games, and hands-on activities to make literacy fun. Students are taught to bring their developing skills to their reading and writing which is the ultimate goal!

In the fall, we begin teaching high-frequency sight words. These words are a combination of some of the most common words found in text (ex: the & and) as well as some words that have irregular spellings.

One of the ideas behind teaching these words is that if a child comes across them in a book, they will know them at an automatic level and can use their reading skills (ex: sounding out) on words that are decodable.

In kindergarten, to make this fun, we call the sight words passwords and put them on our classroom door. When children enter or exit our rooms, they read the passwords for reinforcement. We also practice reading and writing these words in a variety of ways and they are added to our classroom word wall! Practice finding, reading and writing these words at home is also very beneficial!