Kindergarten Case Study: Supporting Kindergarteners With No Letter Knowledge ~ Ep. 105

Episode Summary

It can feel overwhelming when a student comes to kindergarten with zero letter or sound knowledge. But I promise, there’s no need to panic. In this episode, I’m walking you through exactly how I approach this situation with compassion, confidence, and a clear plan. Just because they don’t know their letters yet doesn’t mean they won’t. Most students just need time, exposure, and support. This episode shows you how to give them all three.

In this episode I share:

• Why starting with name recognition and phonological awareness is key
• What to actually focus on in those first few weeks
• How I build foundational literacy skills in just 5–10 extra minutes a day
• When to loop in families (and when it’s not necessary yet)
• Easy ways to track progress and offer extra support

Related Episodes:

• Teaching the Alphabet: 6 Things to Do Each Time ~ Ep. 104
• How I Teach my Students Letter Names and Their Sounds ~ Ep. 54
• Engaging Families in Supporting Struggling Learners ~ Ep. 67

Learn More:

• Empowering Educators with Effective Student Progress Tracking
• Phonological awareness versus phonemic awareness: what and how to teach

Resources:

• Year-Long Literacy Support for Small Group Instruction BUNDLE -Reading & Writing

Connect with Zeba:

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

Read the Transcript

[0:00] Hey, teacher friends, it’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe, and on today’s episode, I want to do something just slightly different, more of a case study approach. I decided this year, this school year, I wanted to do a couple of different case studies throughout the year on the podcast to help talk through how I would handle certain situations. So to be more specific and not just general advice, but like exactly how I would help in this situation or what I would do if I was the teacher in that situation. Today’s episode, I came up with the case study idea. But if you ever want to supply the case study scenario, like if you have a situation that you want advice with and that you think would be good for the podcast, you think would be good to help other teachers, please reach out. I want to do a math one, a social emotional one, ones that teachers, situations that teachers face regularly. So with that being said, today’s case study is all about what to do if a child comes to school with no letter ID or sound knowledge. How would I handle that?

[1:09] You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast, where kindergarten teachers come 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? Let’s get started.

[2:00] Okay, so let’s say that I… I have had this before, but let’s say that I have a student coming to school and I start to do some basic assessment in the fall. And I discover that they cannot identify letters or sounds. Usually they can maybe identify one or two letters based on their name. But other than that, they don’t know any of their letters or sounds. So how would I handle that situation? First thing I would want to know is can they write their name? Or can they recognize their name? If they cannot, that’s definitely a starting point because I am going to quickly need them to be able to recognize and write their name. So I want to work on name writing activities with them. The other thing that I want to check in on is phonological awareness with them. Can they hear sounds, chunks? Can they rhyme? time and so I would work on that first because my guess is they’ll need some work with that if they don’t know their letters or sounds yet. The other thing I want to say is before I talk about what I would do for phonological awareness is don’t panic if they don’t know their letters and sounds when they are first coming to kindergarten. It’s okay because you are going to teach everyone letters and sounds and if you want help with that I will share resources in the show notes from other episodes I’ve done. But don’t panic. You will be teaching them letters and sounds progressively.

[3:33] Over time, repetitively. And so that will be done like whole class. So start with all of that instruction. And instead, for like extra practice with this child, maybe start to fill in some of the basic foundation blocks that might be missing for the child. So that’s where the phonological awareness comes in and the name writing if they aren’t doing that yet. So for phonological awareness, start with, obviously we’re listening to, we’re starting with sounds, listening to sounds, hearing sounds, identifying sounds.

[4:06] Matching beginning sounds, not connected to letters. So not saying like bat and bear both start with B. No. Just which word starts with the same sound as bat, bear, or game, making this up on the spot. But I want them to hear the same beginning sound from bat to bear, right? Same with rhyming sounds. You can work on that as well at the same time. So which word rhymes with cat, hat, or dog? And then you can say cat, hat, cat, They have the same ending sound, at. They both rhyme. You can really break it down for them. But it’s just hearing the sounds and sort of identifying them that we want them to start doing. We’re not bringing in letters yet. Eventually, over time, with that, you can start switching accents.

[5:00] The sounds, beginning, first, then ending, then middle. But like saying, okay, if I have bat and I change the beginning sound to, then my word is going to be cat.

[5:12] And speaking of cat, my cat came to join me. So it’s about manipulating the sounds, hearing the sounds and manipulating the sounds. And you’re doing all this just in a quick, you know, five to 10 minute activity. Do it whole class. You can do it in small group, but for this child in particular that does not have any letters or sounds coming into kindergarten, you need to build up those basic literacy skills of can they hear the sounds? Because if they can’t hear them, there’s no way they’re going to be able to learn which letter makes what sound, right? This is a key foundational skill. You can also work with them on, and actually I would do this before changing the sounds, but just isolating the sound. So like, what’s the beginning sound you hear in bat?

[6:00] Buh. Good. And again, not connecting to the letters unless you have taught that letter. If you’ve already taught the class that B says buh, then you can connect it to the letters or the letter chart that you have or, you know, something like that. But only if you’ve taught the letter. Don’t introduce letters at this point. But it is good if you have taught the letter to start connecting those sounds to the letter. For the child that comes to kindergarten with no letters or sounds, as you are teaching the whole class letters and sounds, you may want to consider a little extra practice with the student. Five minutes max of just going over the letters and sounds that the class has learned, like a flashcard.

[6:44] And just seeing, just doing it an extra dose from the other class. If you are noticing that they are still struggling with the letters that you’ve been teaching and practicing as a whole class, then I would start to add in kinesthetic practice with them. You can use sand, like writing the letter in the sand, writing the letter with Play-Doh or shaving cream, something like that. Wikistix is great. But so what I would do is I would flip over the flashcard of a letter they’ve learned, have them maybe identify it, find it on the letter chart, because I want them to use it as a resource to help them if they’re stuck on what sound the letter makes. It will show them, the letter chart will show them the keyword so that they can remember the sound. So it’ll say A, B, B, B, B. Okay.

[7:36] Then I’ll have them practice writing that letter. So they’ve identified it, they’ve said it, but now they’re going to practice writing it. And that extra kinesthetic practice can sometimes really make a difference for kids helping the learning to stick. So I might have them write the letter in the sand and then we do it again, do another letter.

[7:56] And again, I’m just doing the letters that the class has learned. I’m just doing a quick extra five to 10 minutes of extra practice.

[8:02] And if you’ve learned these letters and they still don’t have them yet, start with the letters that are in their name because those are the ones that are more likely to stick first because they are reading and writing their name a lot. And you’ve hopefully done some work on name writing and all of that if they didn’t have that right away.

[8:20] When they first come to kindergarten and you notice that they haven’t learned any letters and sounds, I don’t think it’s necessary to communicate that with families yet because when you meet with them for your fall conference or something you could mention that you they know three letters so far but remember but remind them like we’ve only taught them two letters so i’m not worried about it right now because i think it’s you freak out if you’re used to a population of students where kids are mostly coming to kindergarten with almost all their letters or sounds when you have a kid without that you can maybe want to freak out a little bit but there’s no need because most often they just need that whole group instruction of what the letters are and being introduced to the letters and practice with the letters and they will get to the same point as the other kids most often right so there’s no need to worry the families yet because we don’t know if there’s a struggling point for them, or if it’s just the process of how kids learn, right? The typical process. So you could say like, okay, every week when we learn a new letter, I’ll send something home. It’d be good for you to practice with those letters that they’ve learned, right?

[9:36] As you are checking in with the student and seeing and observing how they are doing, learning the letters that you’ve taught them, if you’re not seeing as much progress, and so then you might be, like I said, doing that kinesthetic practice with your small group, then you could encourage families to, you know, spend a little extra time reinforcing the learning at home. Just in stress five to ten minutes flip over these flashcards these are the letters we’ve learned or do these activities that I sent home related to letters that we’ve learned and usually just telling the families like hey they’ve learned four letters we’ve taught eight so they’re making some progress but they’re having a really hard time with these four letters it’d be great if you could practice them at home like oftentimes that’s all you need now if a kid has a learning disability or a struggle that you maybe not is not diagnosed yet maybe you don’t know that yet because they haven’t been trying to learn up until now then they will have a harder time learning letters potentially and you might need to do more practice or send home more work with families or keep more data so that you can talk about it at you know progress data progress meetings or with your admin team. I have a whole episode on like tracking student progress that you can listen to.

[10:56] But those are more the rare cases. And so when we first see a kid that’s coming to kindergarten as with no letters to sounds, we can’t assume that they’re having trouble learning. And we need to realize that they just need a chance to learn.

[11:10] Than a chance to do the learning. And so just, but they are someone that I would keep a close eye on. They are someone that I would check in with regularly. They are someone that I would work with an extra five minutes of an extra flip of the cards that we’ve learned, right? Or doing that phonological awareness work, like I talked about. If you are looking for an easy way to track their progress, I love using my assessment graphs and I’ll check in with them once a month to see how they’re doing and how they’re growing in their letter knowledge. You can get those in my store and I’ll put the link in the show notes. So this was like specific for what I would do if a student has no letters or sounds when they come to kindergarten and how I would support that specific student. And I got into it a little bit, but next week I’m going to get into it even more of what a small group in literacy could look like when we are focusing on teaching letters and sounds. So when we are working with the whole class on teaching letters and sounds, or if a group of students aren’t learning their letters and sounds, what would that small group look like? So stay tuned for that. And like I said, if you want to offer one of my case study situations, if you think it could help other teachers, I would love to hear from you. So reach out anytime.

[12:30] 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 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!