About this BoardLiteracy Block

There are three parts to our 21/2 hour

Literacy Block in Kindergarten.

•Skills Block – 30 minutes

•Reader’s Workshop – 1 hour

•Writer’s Workshop – 1 hour

This board will highlight some of the lessons and activities that are taught in Skills Block

at the beginning of Kindergarten.

Skills Block

All children come to Kindergarten with different phonics knowledge of letters and sounds. We introduce a letter a day. The letters are not introduced to the students in alphabetical order. We begin with the letters that say their sound when you say their name (Tt, Bb, Kk, Jj, Dd). The students learn how to form the capital and lower-case letter when they write it, the name of the letter and the sound that it makes. We might listen to a story, share the reading of a poem or share the reading of a big book that focuses on the letter. We create a student generated list of words that begin with the letter sound. The words are added to our word wall so that the students can refer to it during workshops. Once all of the consonants are introduced, we focus on the vowels. The boys and girls learn songs about the vowels and their long and short sounds. During the work period of skills block the students work with the letters. They might produce pictures on paper that have the beginning sound of the letter, use manipulatives to build words or sort pictures according to their beginning and ending sounds.

Next Step for Skills Block Instruction

Skills Block is the foundation to learning the language rules and letter combinations. As they begin to learn these rules, their reading ability naturally grows. It is more difficult to become a reader than it is to improve their reading. With daily emersion of letters, sounds and language rules their reading will improve. Our next step will be to teach the students “The Bossy e” and “When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking”. These two rules along with the knowledge of letter and sounds align perfectly with the beginning books students learn to read .

Student Commentary

One activity the students participate in during the work period is matching the beginning letter card to a picture. Nick was able to successfully match the letter “c” to the picture of a cat. He also knew that zipper began with “z”, fish began with “f”, and lock began with “l”.

Student Commentary

Courtney and Brandon worked together to form words to match a picture. They used magnetic letters to spell all the sounds they heard. They were able to spell jet, cat, run, and pig. When they tried to spell the word crab, they began it with a “k” instead of a “c”. They have learned that both “c” and “k” make the same sound. They will naturally learn by seeing the word crab in their reading that the word begins with a “c” instead of a “k”.

Student Commentary

During Skills Block we often teach songs or poems to help the students remember language rules. We taught a vowel song. The students held letter cards to help them remember the names of the vowels as we sang. When it came time to clap instead of saying the letters, the person who was holding the letter card flipped it over to show we should be clapping instead of saying the name.

Student Commentary The students often have the opportunity to

draw pictures to match the letter we learned that day. At the beginning of the year the students could barely draw a detailed picture. Now they have moved to writing the beginning and ending sound and any other sounds they hear in the word. As we continue working with vowels, the students will learn that all words have a vowel and they will begin to include them in their spelling.

This is Ashley’s work over time in skills block from the first nine weeks of school. Her growth in phonics is easy to see.

• August 28th- Ashley drew detailed pictures of words that begin with “s”. She wrote an “s” with each picture to represent the beginning sound.

• September 10th - Ashley was able to write the beginning and ending sounds that she hears in the words of the pictures she drew.

• September 22nd- Ashley included the beginning and ending sounds and she identified the vowel sound in one of her pictures.

• October 2oth– Ashley began to include multiple vowel sounds and the consonants she hears in her spelling. She also used the word wall in the classroom to help her spell “apple”. Without the word wall, Ashley may not have included two “p” sounds or the silent “e”.

You are looking at Lainey’s work over time from skills block in the first nine weeks of school. It is easy to see Lainey’s growth in phonics.

• August 28th- Lainey drew detailed pictures of words that begin with “s”. She only wrote one “s” to represent the beginning sound of her pictures.

• October 2nd- Lainey was able to write most of the consonant sounds that she hears in the words of the pictures she drew.

• October 6th- Lainey began to include beginning, ending, and vowel sounds in her spelling.

• October 21st – Lainey began to include multiple vowel sounds and the consonants she hears in her spelling.

Kindergarten Reading Standard 1:

Print – Sound Code

•Knowledge of Letters and their Sounds