Starting at the very beginning of the school year, Parkview kindergarten students have worked on developing strong prerequisite skills for reading and writing, such as letter-sound correspondences, handwriting strokes, segmenting and blending, and tracking from left to right. Having this strong foundation is crucial, as students are now being tasked with using these skills to read, and write simple phrases and sentences.
One of the primary ways that students work on applying these foundational skills is through the use of decodable readers from our literacy curriculum, CKLA. Each unit’s reader is made up of stories that students can read using the skills that they have been working on. For example, students have recently learned that the letter ‘s’ often spells the /z/ sound when it follows a short vowel sound; so, this unit’s reader has many words with this pattern, such as his, and has. Each unit’s reader reflects students’ ever-increasing set of skills. Students practice reading these stories in whole-class, partner, and independent settings.
In addition to utilizing decodable readers, students have been applying their knowledge of tricky words by reading a picture reader, another component of the CKLA curriculum. As new tricky words are introduced, students use the picture reader to practice reading these words within sentences. Students also practice spelling tricky words by completing daily activity pages, and games during WIN time. It has been fun to see students’ confidence as readers increase as they practice each day!
