Once your Kindergarten students learn how to blend, spell, and read CVC words fluently, you may wonder, well where do I go from here? The next phonics skill I work on with my students is digraphs or consonant blends. Today, I will share some of my favorite hands-on and engaging digraph activities for Kindergarten students. You can use these digraph activities in your whole group lesson, as a center activity, or as independent work!
Digraphs are two letters that make a single sound, such as th, sh, ch, wh, ph, and ck. In Kindergarten, I would spend about 2-3 weeks on digraphs, learning the patterns and sounds for each, reading words with digraphs and then spelling simple words with digraphs. Your students may already know many words with digraphs, like “this” and “she”, so you will just be adding more words that your students will be able to decode and read! Here are some of my favorite digraph activities for Kindergarten students!
Grab this visual for free here!
The first skill you will want to teach is how to identify the digraph in a word. You can practice this by saying a word and having students pick out the beginning digraph, orally by saying a word, “ship” and then asking your students what digraph they heard- “sh”.
One of the first digraph activities for my Kindergarten students is these clip card wheels. Students will look at the digraph in the middle and then clip each picture that has the same beginning digraph sound. This helps them isolate the digraph sound, which will help them when they begin to read words later.
Try a sample of this digraph activity for free here!
Another skill you will want to teach your students first is thinking of words for each digraph. Put the digraph in the middle of a piece of anchor chart paper. Give students 1 minute to think of as many words that include that digraph sound. Call on students to share words, write them down (or have students help you spell) on the anchor chart. You can also attempt to draw a picture that matches each one.
Every time I introduce a new digraph, we create one of these anchor charts as a class. I'll start by showing a YouTube video like this one to introduce the digraph, then call on students to say words with that specific digraph in them. I like to hang them up around my classroom as a visual for the next few weeks as we are working on learning digraphs.
You can also do this activity independently and have students complete this on a piece of paper.
Another way to practice identifying digraphs in words is with a cut-and-paste sort. With this activity, students will look at a picture, say the word, and isolate the beginning digraph sound. This also practices the phonemic awareness skill of phoneme isolation. Picture sorts are really helpful in distinguishing similarly sounding digraphs, especially “sh” and “ch”
Once your students can identify digraphs and read words with digraphs, then you can practice spelling digraphs in a word correctly. In Kindergarten, you do not need to focus on having your students be able to spell the entire word, unless it is a short vowel word, but getting the digraph spelled correctly. They can always spell the word phonetically, but should be able to have the digraph spelled correctly. Once they are in First Grade, then they will learn how to spell more words with digraphs.
Stamp it activities practice spelling the digraph in a word. Students will look at the picture, then using stamps, they will stamp the correct digraph in the boxes.
Find the Digraphs and Consonant Blends Phonics Unit for Kindergarten on TPT here.
If you teach First Grade, I have created a separate unit for each skill. The Digraphs Unit covers both beginning and ending digraphs, along with more spelling activities. The Consonant Blends Unit covers both beginning and ending consonant blends, along with additional spelling activities.
If you are looking for more activities and how to practice consonant blends, check out this blog post here: 4 Activities to Practice Consonant Blends in Kindergarten.
