Back to school is so much fun, because it’s time to break out all of our favorite alphabet activities! I love teaching letter sounds to early readers.
It’s important that we are sure to reinforce their knowledge of letter sounds. It takes repeated practice to cement the different sounds that each letter makes as students learn so many at the beginning of the year.
Picture Identification
Using pictures is a powerful way to help students reinforce the sound that different letters make. This simply means that students can match letters to different pictures that begin with that sound. This provides a variety of benefits for our learners!
Benefits of Picture Identification
When students match a letter to a series of pictures that begin with the same sound, they are building their letter sound correspondence skills. It requires a foundation in phonemic awareness for students to be able to say the name of the picture, isolate the beginning sound, and determine if it matches the letter they are looking at. That’s a lot of work for one student to do!
Picture identification tasks also build vocabulary skills. Students are naming the pictures they are looking at, and sometimes this can lead to discussions about words they do not recognize. Everything in literacy always comes back to building comprehension. Vocabulary knowledge will play into reading comprehension as students get older.
Getting started with Letter Sound Practice
You can grab my letter sound printables to get started with this task today! Each page has a letter in the center as well as pictures and words around the perimeter of the page. Students can circle the words that begin with that sound, and color the pictures that match. They will be reading words, isolating beginning sounds, and strengthening their alphabetic knowledge all in one task! Grab your set here.
