Exploring Standards-Based Lesson Plans

Letters & The Sounds They Make

I have now decided to do preschool however a lot of preschool is preparing for kindergarten readiness. In a preschool classroom in my center you attend for two years and this upcoming year I will have older toddlers almost 4 and I will need to prepare them for kindergarten. Which means working on a lot of the pre-steps to start common core curriculum. I found a great teacher that posts her intros to these subjects and how they line up to the common core curriculum. The lesson I chose is about Beginning letter sounds. Children are expected to explore and begin to find the beginning letter sound in every day words.

This lines up with the standard “beginning sounds isolation, beginning sounds identification, and free beginning sounds production”. This lesson I line up best to the Language and Literacy domain found in the reading range referring to Phonological Awareness, “With modeling and support identify initial and final sounds in spoken words”.

This teacher uses games and different activities to introduce this subject. The first activity is letter awareness. The children use cut out construction cards each with a different alphabet letter and practice going through them and finding and item with the same letter sound. For example, E and the child says elephant. However, these cards can also be used to name just the sounds like A for aah.

Camping Beginning Sounds, using pictures of items commonly used during camping we begin to find the first letter. Using worksheets, you find a list of ten pictures and using words together the kinds can clap out the words and listen for the first letter they hear. Alternatively, there are smaller post cards with pictures on them and letters the kids match up the letter sounds to the picture. This activity is perfect for introduction and gives the kids letters to choose from.

There are tons of activities and really, I chose this lesson plan because I would use these ideas in my classroom. As my children age I find myself looking for increasingly activities that really push them to their full potential. We practice repeating words and our classroom is labeled by pictures and the first letter it corresponds with. Activities like these help me know I can prepare my children for the next steps of early literacy. Sometimes it is hard to match my lesson plans to common core standards but finding fun activities that push their knowledge really help me. Finding reliable teachers with helpful ideas are crucial because this is new for me. Since I have no experience with older children this will be my first year teaching this age in my own classroom. I will look to this woman for future resource.

https://www.kindergartenworks.com/kindergarten-teaching-ideas/beginning-sounds-printable/