March came in like a lion and April seems like it as well! I’m looking out my window as the snow squalls swirl! In school, we are focusing on new reading and writing skills each day. We start our day with Fundations, our phonics program, which children are in small learning groups led by a teacher practicing important pre-reading skills. As we move into the end of our school year, we are increasingly working on phoneme segmentation (breaking apart words into sounds) and then blending them back together. We focus on CVC words in kindergarten (consonant-vowel-consonant words) but we also introduce children to hearing long and short vowel sounds. (Difficult skills!)
I found this great chart online to remind you of the phonological awareness continuum. Children will fall somewhere along this, and you can help your child at home by practicing these important skills (but don’t forget to make it fun!) Make a game, be playful, have your child show you what they know. I recommend finding some dry erase markers and boards, play dough and magnet letters. 🙂 Many kindergartners at this point in the year are confident at making rhymes, hearing beginning sounds and counting words in sentences. We have been working on syllables, and many children can count syllables in words like their names.
April is Poetry Month and we will be learning songs and poems, which are another wonderful way to practice phonemic and phonological awareness. We will also begin on Bear Unit with our Teddy Bear Float parade coming up right before April vacation. I will be getting the notice out early this week.
