Beginning Sounds Activity – At The Easel

My daughter told me that this summer she is going to learn to read. I didn’t tell her she’d been learning since birth with every word she heard, spoke, recognized, rhymed… the list goes on… all I said was OK. She is right on the cusp of reading independently, but she seems to think she can’t. She thinks that reading is this mythical thing that is firmly in the realm of her older brother but not her. In an effort to show her how easy it is and that she does know how to do this,  I am reviewing a lot of her pre-reading skills. She’s known her letter sounds for a long time, but I needed to show her that. She zipped through this beginning sounds activity and thankfully it had the exact effect I had hoped it would. ” Mama I DO know my letter sounds!” We will be repeating this and replacing beginning sounds with middle and end sounds as well very soon, which is also review for her but when the activity is FUN and novel review isn’t old and tired.

I am often asked how old a child should be for letter sound activities. For both of my children, I let them tell me when they were ready. While reading books and playing with letters ( with activities like this and this) they both started asking and telling me about the sounds. That is when I started introducing these sort of activities. If your child is off to kindergarten this fall and still not interested, don’t fret too much, but I would be trying to play more with letters and read alphabet books to see if you can spark more interest without a hard sell.

Gather your materials. If you don’t have a chalkboard you can do this on a sheet of paper, but I think using the chalkboard and their whole body really adds to their learning. You will also need some chalk.

Draw easily identifiable objects on the outside edges of the chalkboard.

Write the corresponding letters down the middle.

Invite your little genius to come and check it out. Go over the pictures with them to make sure they know what they all are.

Match them up!  At first I didn’t tell her to draw a line and she wrote an H next to the hanger. Which worked too! The lovely thing about doing this on an easel is the magical way that writing ( or drawing lines) on an elevated surface like an easel promotes the proper wrist position for writing. All without a parent or teacher stopping the flow of learning to correct it.

She really liked connecting the sounds with the letters. Like I said I will be doing this a few more times with middle and ending sounds. The only real limitation is my drawing ability.