Teaching the Alphabet

Kindergarten isn’t what it used to be! The entire year of Kindergarten used to be spent jumping into “Letter of the WEEK!” but now our curriculums having us teaching and ABC bootcamp to get kids reading as fast as possible. While there are many different opinions on how Kindergarten has hanged over the year, these are the standards and curriculums we have to follow! So as all teachers do…we make it work!

The way I introduce the alphabet in Kindergarten is split into two parts:
Part 1:

Starting on the third day of school, usually, one we jump into 2 letters a day, we do a quick introduction of the 2 letters of the day, look at some songs and videos about the letters, we play the starfall games(ad link to starfall website) as a whole group then students get a 2 sided coloring page for the letters of the day. One of my FAVORITE pieces to incorporate locking in that letter ID is to use the Leapfrog Letter Factory Alphabet song. I have used this every year and it has never failed to get my whole class knowing their capitol letters AND sounds. We do that everyday for 13 school days until the class has been introduced to the whole alphabet. This “bootcamp” version takes about 3 weeks.

Part 2:

Around the 4th week of school we go back around and go into ‘Letter of the Day!’ Each day we do a letter but this time we are focusing more on how to write the uppercase and lowercase letters and focusing on our beginning sounds from each letter. We go back and use our starfall games and continue using our letter factory songs. This will usually take about 6 weeks of school. By this time I’m usually approaching the end of Quarter 1 of the school year.