When you think of Kindergarten, you probably think of learning the alphabet. It is one of the first skills you will teach. It is also a stepping stone for so many phonemic awareness and phonics skills. However, you may be wondering, “How do I teach letter recognition?” Today, I am going to share how to teach letter recognition in Kindergarten and give you a free sample lesson to try in your classroom.
How often should you teach a new letter?
Many curriculums suggest a letter-per-week approach to teaching letter recognition and beginning letter sounds. However, this is an outdated approach and not very beneficial for Kindergarten students. If you were to teach a letter per week, you would spend 26 weeks working on letters and sounds. This would be before being able to work on more phonics skills, such as short vowels and CVC words. Students would not be able to blend until months into school, once they know enough letters. You can read more about why you shouldn't teach a letter per week here: Why You Shouldn't Teach a Letter Every Week
Where to start with letter recognition
One of the first assessments you should do in Kindergarten is a letter recognition and sounds assessment. Depending on these results, it will show you exactly where to start with your students. It also helps you group them into center groups based on what they already know. For some years, I have had the majority of my class already know all their letters and sounds. During those years I could progress to blending much sooner in the year. In other years, I have had the majority of my class know very few letters and sounds, so I really had to spend more time there. You can use this one-page pre-assessment to test students on a few beginning Kindergarten skills.
Following a scope and sequence to teaching letter recognition
Through my research and experience, I've found that focusing one week or so on JUST recognizing letters is beneficial to get your kids started on letter recognition. During that time, we work on the letters in our names, and matching upper and lowercase letters. Then, we do a letter-per-day approach, where we focus on both the letter and the main sound it produces. It typically takes 6 weeks to get through all the letters and sounds. This is the start of our phonemic awareness and phonics instruction.
You can get the scope and sequence that I use inside the Kindergarten Phonics Letter Recognition and Sounds Unit here.
Rather than teaching letters in alphabetical order, I use a sequence of letters that are most commonly found in 3 letter, Consonant Vowel Consonant (CVC) words. The purpose of structuring it this way is to start blending sounds as soon as possible. It's much harder to blend words using A-B-C-D-E, as there are only a few words that you can combine to make CVC words. If you start with M-A-P-S-T, you can create more words and start blending with -at, -ap, and -am word families. There is no “perfect” or “right way” letter sequence to teach, but by not using the alphabetical order, you give them an opportunity to blend, which is the end goal!
Letter Recognition Activities and Lesson Plan
Now that you are ready to teach a letter per day, what do you teach? Using this phonics routine, I teach a letter and its main sound each day. After the lesson, they break into center activities, where we will do the Letter Craft for the day, another hands-on activity from the Letter Recognition Center Activities, plus an independent activity from the Letter Recognition Worksheets.
You can find more Letter Recognition activity ideas here.
Try out a sample Letter Recognition Lesson Plan in your classroom!
If you want to try out a sample lesson teaching letter recognition and sounds, plus the letter recognition activities, you can enter your email below to get one sent straight to your email inbox!
If you are looking for an easy, already done-for-you way to teach letter identification and sounds, you can grab Letter Recognition and Sounds Phonics Unit – available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
These phonics units include everything you need to teach phonics with very little planning and prep. Each unit includes a scope and sequence, phonemic awareness warm-ups, lesson plans, assessments, centers, and worksheets to help you teach any Kindergarten or First Grade phonics skill.
I hope this post was helpful as you begin to teach alphabet recognition and sounds in Kindergarten!
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