How I Teach my Students Letter Names and Their Sounds ~ Ep. 54

Episode Summary

Teaching letter names and sounds to your students can be tricky, so in this episode, I take you through my teaching methods for letter sounds, which is influenced by the phonics curriculum I use, Fundations. I share insights on the significance of phonological awareness as a foundation for early literacy and how it is important to integrate phonological awareness with letter instruction. I also share my structured approach to letter sounds instruction, how many letters to teach each week, and provide systematic review practices and student-led learning. 

In this episode I share:

• Importance of phonological awareness
• Effective letter teaching strategies
• Daily review practices
• Blending simple words

Resources Mentioned:

• Kindergarten Phonics Activities Bundle
• Kindergarten Assessments Printable Year-Long Tracking
• Kindergarten Decodable Passages
• Decodable Sentences Handwriting Pages
• Make a Rhyme, Make a Move | Rhyming Words | Jack Hartmann

Connect with Zeba:

• Instagram – @kindergartencafe
• Facebook – @kindergartencafe
• Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
• Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe

Read the Transcript

[0:00] Hey teacher friends, it’s about time that I do this episode. This episode is all on how I teach letter sounds and I’d written some blog posts on how I teach letters and sounds and I’ve done a lot of learning since then and I’ve gotten a new phonics curriculum that has really changed how I think about teaching letters and sounds. Well, not really. I just see how effective it is. I use foundations now. So I want to teach you today how to teach letters and sounds if you don’t have a curriculum and things to look for when choosing a curriculum. But I do not consider myself an expert. I consider myself learning alongside all of you and just doing what I can to learn the best way to teach my students how to read and how to write. So I just wanted to preface that. It’s not completely changed from the way I used to, but it has made it better. It has made my teaching more effective. So that’s what I want to get into today to help you be more effective teachers for your students.

[1:00] Music. You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teacherscome to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love?

[1:53] So the first thing that I want to say is you can’t teach kids to read and write solely by teaching them the letter names and the letter sounds. You need to also be teaching phonological awareness. And a lot of this should come before or at the beginning of teaching the letter sounds and then continue throughout the year. Really, when kids are learning to read and write, they need to hear the sounds first. And so that work on phonological awareness is helping them to hear those sounds. The big chunks, starting with whole words, like what is a word compared to a sentence, where one word starts, where one word ends, and going smaller chunks of rhyming chunks, syllables. And then you get into phonemic awareness, which is the individual letter sounds. Sounds and that’s what we’re getting into with the letter sounds so you know work on doing some fun rhyming games singing songs with the kids clapping out words when you’re doing sentences that kind of stuff is important foundational work to be going on alongside teaching kids the letters and the sounds a really simple game to work on this when you’re calling kids over to the rug and you’re doing a transition or you’re having them line up is just simply saying like, what’s the word that starts with the sound buh?

[3:17] And having them just come up with different words that start with that sound. Now that’s also connected nicely to teaching them letter sounds, or saying like, what rhymes with cat?

[3:28] There’s a really fun chat Cartman video that’s like, make a rhyme, tell me something, how about you? I’m not good at it. But my point is, it’s very catchy.

[3:37] Make a rhyme, make a move, tell me something, how about you? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s really fun, really catchy, and I highly recommend it. And I’ll put the link below. And you can then copy that when you’re doing a transition and just have kids. You’ll say a word and have them make a rhyme or like say, I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with cat and then have them come up with it and tell the kids which word you were thinking of. So they’ll go through the list and then you’d be like, yep, I was thinking of a bat. Kind of like 20 questions in a way, right? Where you’re saying it rhymes with cat and then they’re guessing. So those are fun transitional ways to quickly practice rhyming. If you don’t have a curriculum for your school and you are looking for things, I have a bunch of resources that I do. They’re more for intervention groups and centers. And so I do them like in small groups with kids that I know need to work on rhyming practice and stuff like that. If you’re looking for more whole class kind of lessons and things, I hear UFLI, the University of Florida Literacy Institute, I believe, has amazing free resources for teachers, free curriculum. You can just print out activities based on what your kids need. So you could print out rhyming lessons and things like that. I use Hegarty in my class for phonological awareness, and we use foundations. And in foundations, they have components of this as well. So that’s something to consider when you are looking at a curriculum is do they have woven in phonological awareness practice?

[5:07] So on to the letter sounds. First thing I want to say is what is definitely research proven not effective is to do one letter a week or like one letter a day. There used to be a whole movement and it would just take, well, it would take 26 weeks to get to all the letters of the alphabet. It’s also proven not to be effective at all to teach the letters in the alphabetical order. and so there isn’t really a research proven method for the exact order that you should teach the letters in.

[5:40] There’s different theories and all different programs have their own order that they teach the letters in. Some do it based on handwriting and the sounds because some sounds are easier to make than others like the sounds that are in the front of your mouth versus the back of your mouth and then vowels are really tricky. So know that there’s no like correct or or incorrect way to teach the letters, except for it’s not effective to teach it in ABC order. And you shouldn’t just teach one letter a week. I know it’s cute to do one letter a week and do lots of crafts related to that, but that’s not actually helping teach kids how to read and write. If you’re in pre-K, though, you have all the time in the world, that could totally make sense. You want to spend more time diving into the words that start with that letter, the sounds, and you’re not really needing to ensure complete accuracy with knowing the letters. So in pre-K, that makes sense. But in kindergarten, we just don’t have the time for that. And it’s not very effective. So in foundations, they do two to three letters a week. That works well. And, you know, I have some kids that come to kindergarten already knowing all their letters. And I have some kids that come to kindergarten not knowing hardly any. And what I like about the way foundations does it by teaching two or three letters a week is even the kids that know that letter and that sound, they might not be 100% on the sound of the letter, but they might know the name.

[7:08] Or vice versa. And so it makes sure that everyone’s on the same page. And it gets into the handwriting of the letter as well. So again, even if they know the name and the sound, they might not know how to correctly format the writing. So there’s something in it for everyone. And it’s good to make sure that every kid has a really strong foundation in the letter sounds.

[7:29] And so the way that they do it is they teach, like I said, two to three letters a week, they include handwriting writing with that and they have included systematic repeated practice every single day. So every single day we go over all of the letters that they’ve learned of the alphabet and that practice alone like that’s something I wish I had been doing many years earlier because that practice was made a huge difference to my students and it seems like okay they’re gonna really get bored with practicing the same letters every day, especially when you’ve got like 10 letters, like it’s like, okay, it’s the same 10 letters. But the kids need that practice and they don’t get bored. We get bored, they don’t get bored.

[8:16] One thing you can do to spice it up a little bit is to have different kids take turns leading the review. So I’ll call on different kids, everyone gets at least one turn before we go on to a second, and they get to hold the baby echo. It’s like an owl, that’s their symbol for foundations, but they get to hold the pointer and they point to the letter and lead the group just like I would. Now, when you’re reviewing the letters, you say, and I did do this before, you say the letter name, the word associated, the keyword associated with the letter, and the sound. So the keyword is there to help the kids remember the sound. And so it’s really important, whatever curriculum you have, whatever alphabet chart you have or resources you have that your keywords are matching the sounds that we’re wanting to teach them. So ice cream is.

[9:08] Great word for I, except for the fact that it’s saying I instead of IH. So we, Foundations uses itch. Igloo is another one, iguana, right? That’s saying IH. Elephant is tricky because you hear the L and not the E, right? Like just little things like that. X for years, I used x-ray, but that’s not actually the sound that X makes.

[9:33] It’s X and it’s always at the end of words. So Fundations uses box, I believe, or fox is another one, obviously. So it doesn’t really matter like which keyword you use. But again, as long as it matches the sound that we’re trying to help kids to isolate and to learn. But you want to have those keywords when you’re practicing so that kids can associate that. So if they’re having trouble thinking, wait, what is that sound? Okay, B, bat, buh. Oh, okay, buh. Like it becomes second nature and they all go together, B, bat, buh. So when you’re reviewing the letters every day, the kids would, the kid who’s leading would point to the letter and you want to have them do it in random order. You don’t want to do it in ABC order. You have the kid point to a letter, have them point, so they choose a random letter and they say B-B-B. They say the letter, the name, and the sound, and then they point to the kids and the kids say B-B-B. So everyone’s participating, but having the kids lead is a way to spice it up if they They are getting a little, not that I really don’t think the kids get bored doing it every day, but that is a way to spice it up. And it’s a great little assessment for you to see which of the letters do they know really well, which are they struggling with, and helps boost their confidence. Like sharing from the whole class gives them a chance to shine.

[10:52] The same keywords and like picture cue that I have are the same resources that I want to have for the kids when they’re writing. So I have a version of that alphabet chart for their writing folder. I have it around the room so that they can easily find the keyword if they need help remembering it. Once they’ve learned pretty much all the letters, we don’t necessarily review you every single one, every single time. We’ll do like 10 to 15, depending on the day, and mix it up so that it’s random and the kids are getting just practice with different letters. Because by that point, you would expect the kids know, almost all the kids know 100% of the letters. You really want like 80 to 90% of the kids to know all the letters by the time you’ve taught all the letters. And if not, then you want to pull a small group and make sure those kids are really working with you on every single letter and you can even drill down which letter they don’t know and help them just practice those letters that they’re not learning. That’s where my resources can come in for the extra practice that I do with them and activities like that for in small groups. You can also use my assessments to keep track of which letters they know and which sounds they know and I do love the graph that I have there to help show the progress of how many letters they’ve been learning.

[12:10] Once students have learned all their letters and sounds, then we can start working on blending simple words. And so actually, I don’t necessarily wait until all the kids have learned every single letter. For me and my students and my population, where a lot of them knew a lot of the letters coming in, I felt like by…

[12:31] November, they were ready to start blending simple words with the letters they had learned. So consonant, vowel, consonant. So I would meet with kids in small groups and do my reading decodable passages.

[12:46] They’re designed to progress with the letters that kids have learned. And so with those, we practice just blending out simple CBC words and reading very simple passages with With the letters that they’ve learned. So they obviously need to know the vowels before you can do this. But then once they know the vowels, you can start doing very simple blending practice. And I would even start with just simple alphabet cards or magnetic letters and just having like one word that you sound out like cat and then switching out the first letter and just keeping the last part the same. Name so that they’re getting used to blending those sounds. And Fundations teaches the kids to tap out the sounds, but that’s just a way of saying each individual sound and then blending it together. So you tap on the fingers, k-a-t, and then you blend the fingers together. You slide underneath, k-a-t. It’s a way to like represent the letters. You can do this too with like Alconan boxes or little cubes on the table, having them tap those cubes or move those cubes into place for each sound, and then blending them together. So I have some activities like that as well, where they are with the CVC words, where they tap, like there’s a dot underneath the letter, so they tap onto the letters, and then there’s an arrow too, so they tap and then slide.

[14:09] Right? So they break it apart and then blend it together. But that’s where we get into more how to read, how to write.

[14:16] And that’s based on the assumption that they have a solid foundation in letter sounds. So that’s how I teach letter sounds and how I would teach letter sounds, even if I didn’t have foundations. What I always used to do is have not teach it in alphabetical order and to teach the letters with the letter name, the word and the sound. But the thing that I would have done differently and that I love that Fundations does and that I’ve seen a big difference in is that repeated practice every day of going over the letters every day saying the name, the word, and the sound. So, and again, the kids don’t get bored. We’re the ones who get bored, but it really makes a big difference. So that’s how I teach letter sounds. If you want other episodes on other literacy topics, I’d love to know what you’re curious about, what I can help you with. If you’re looking for resources, let me know. Send me a message on Instagram. Use the code word LETTERSOUNDS. Let me know you’ve been listening. I’d love to hear from you. Our quote of the day. I almost forgot again. We were sounding out a word in a book and the boy, six years old, sounds out pick, pick, pick, like pick your nose. So that was great. That’s great. he understood the vocabulary.

[15:32] Had a connection to the word. That means he’ll remember it. Great. Hope you liked that episode and found it helpful. And we’ll see you in the next episode.

[15:39] Music.

[15:45] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then!