There are so many great early reader winter activities you can use to focus on important literacy skills. Early readers need frequent repetition with literacy concepts. When working with early readers, it’s especially important to heavily focus on phonemic awareness and phonics activities. Read on for some fun winter themed activities to use with your early readers!
Winter Word Work
Winter Phonemic Awareness Activities
Readers will still be developing their phonemic awareness skills in the winter. One thing you can do is switch out objects that you use with your readers. Readers can use the winter themed objects during your phonemic awareness time. These objects work well for phonemic awareness concepts like identifying and switching out beginning/middle/end sounds.
Grab some clips, mini bottle brush trees, and some pom poms.
Then, here are some ways to use them:
- State a word and have readers stretch out the sounds, touching an object for each sound.
- Students can physically open and close the clips for each sound heard in a word.
- You say the sounds, students repeat you and push an object for each sound and then blend the sounds to make the word.
- After stating a word, ask students to put their finger on the object which matches up to the position of the vowel sound in the word. So, for ‘cat’, they’d have three objects in front of them and then put their finger on the one in the middle.
Phonics and High Frequency Word Work
Students can use bottle brush trees and fake snow to practice writing high frequency words. They can also use these for writing phonics skills focused words.
You can provide students with cards that have words they need to practice. Or, you can simply state a word and have students “write” it, without seeing it.
This is a great warm up activity to use during small groups, in the winter!
Winter Passages for Early Readers
Reading words in context, should be the next step in your early reader activities. You want them to practice the skills they just reviewed, with actual texts.
The literacy skills you are focusing on with your early readers include concepts like individual sounds in words. You will want to make sure you are using decodable texts, which give early readers a chance to practice these skills.
I have a set of 30 winter themed early reader passages that are perfect to use all winter long. Readers will apply their knowledge of letter sounds when decoding words. They will also apply their knowledge of high frequency words as they make their way through each story.
You can grab these decodable early reader winter themed passages here!
Looking for more than just decodable texts?
If your readers are ready for more than just decodable texts, check out my Winter Guided Reading Passages packs, for Levels A-D here! These also include many high frequency words and decodable words, with the addition of some challenging words, as well.
Interested in finding more winter literacy activities and resources? Check out this blog post here!
