The photos and ideas on the following pages are examples of kindergarten literacy activities from my classroom and from Internet chatboards. Please be patient--it may take a few minutes to view the pictures.

Updated 6-15-04

Working

with Words

Make word family houses for student practice. Begin introducing word families early in the year. For example, when you teach students the word "pink", have students think of rhyming words such as link, rink, sink, think and write them on a "house" that is posted in the room. Even though not all of the students will understand this concept early in the year, most will catch on as the year progresses and you do other word family activities. Students can use magnetic letters to spell out the words. One of my students' favorite activities was writing a word on a dry erase board as I told them each letter. Then they would erase the first letter and I would tell them a new letter to write in its place. They loved figuring out the new word they'd written. Later in the year, we would change the ending or middle letters also.

We're building words during reading time. We put letters together and blend their sounds to make words.

We're writing words from the "_op" word family. The children change the initial letter to make new words and write them on the dry erase board.

This is actually a tic-tac-toe board for Valentine's Day, but we used heart-shaped letters to build three letter words from the "_op" word family.