Reinforcing your students’ understanding of letter names and sounds is so important. Following these 4 steps during letter practice is sure to cement the learning for your students.
Say It
As students are learning letters, One of the biggest struggles can be keeping them all straight in their heads. It’s easy to get certain letter sounds and names confused. So, for every alphabet task you do, make sure students say each letter as they see it. After naming the letter ask them to make the sound the letter makes. This will help them keep all of the different letters of the alphabet straight in their mind as they learn new letters and sounds.
Write It
Writing letters as often as possible will help students remember letter formation. This can be a tracing task, or writing the letter from memory after looking at it. It’s important that students practice forming the letters often to make writing a more fluent task as you get into writing words and sentences.
Draw It
Asking students to think of a object or word that begins with the letter sound in question is a great way to build on phonemic awareness. Students must think through the words that they know and isolate the beginning sound. Then simply asking to draw a picture! Working in a little drawing is a great way to make alphabet practice more fun.
Read and Find It
Give your students brief reading tasks. This can be a sentence or two, a short poem, or a list of words. As they read the text, they circle or highlight the letter each time they see it. Had discussions with the students about what sound the letter is making at the beginning of that word. This builds their decoding skills, fluency, and more.
Utilize these tasks with each letter you introduced to your students this year, and you will see growth and letters sound and name identification as well as letter formation and reading fluency!
You can grab my letter practice pages in my TPT store. These pages can be bound together into a daily journal, and each page includes each of these tasks for every letter in the alphabet.
