Kindergarten Teachers

Hello,

It's my first year teaching kindergarten. I work in a bilungual school with no real curriculum for K.

I would like to start doing letters and their sounds.

I know letters are not taught in alphabetical order.

Can anyone tell me the proper order?

Thanks!!

Re: Kindergarten Teachers

I don't think there is a proper order. When I taught kindergarden, I taught the letter by theme. Ex. A for Apples, F for Fall, C for Colors P for Pumpkins. S for Scarecrows. This is what I would do for Sept & Oct. HTH!

Message edited 9/12/2008 4:17:57 PM.

Re: Kindergarten Teachers

I teach first, but I do consonants in order then vowels in order. But there is another order which is even more jumbled. Some people do the letters that are easiest to write first. But I think what is more important is teaching them the correct sound, meaning that s is sssss, not suh, k is not kuh, b is not buh, etc.

Re: Kindergarten Teachers

I agree about the sounds. It drives me crazy when I hear it being taught that way. Then when the kids are decoding they will decode cata as cah-a-tah, cata. It screws them up royally! I was taught to be careful about the vowels. In grad school they told us never to teach /i/ and /e/ at the same time/close together as well as /o/ and /u/ . They sound very similar and it gets confusing. I also like to use vowel tools to encourage auditory discrimination. I had them color a picture of an apple, Ed (it is a Fundations thing, it clearly disconnects the /e/ from a consonant sound so it doesn't get lost), itch (a monkey scratching himself), octopus and an up arrow for you. I teach them letter keyword sound over the course of a few week. I will say a word and have them hold up the vowel tool that matches the vowel sound in a word. When they get really good at it I put it in a center.

Re: Kindergarten Teachers

I teach letters by theme, too (P for pumpkin, etc), but I am also teaching about all the letters for much of the day when we do interactive writing, or readers workshop with a big book. I also have a poster of the alphabet in order with pics for each letter and in order we say, "a, apple, ah...B, bear, buh...etc.) They have this same chart on the back of their writing folders, too, so they can refer to it when stretching out words to write! I agree that vowels are the trickiest...but don''t ger hung up on them. In my district, we do not expect mastery of vowel usage by the end of kindergarten. If they are experimenting with them in writing, and using reading strategies they are good)~ when i teach vowels i use sight word chunks at, it, ug, ot, et. I find it helps.

Re: Kindergarten Teachers

i know houghton mifflin did the letters in order from easiest to say/understand to trickiest -

i.e., b, m, p, s, t and r were very early in the year they didn't touch on vowels too much

i always sang a phonics song w/my kids after calendar to start our skills block - it was fun and i loved how much the kids learned so quickly.

we also did themes too to make life easier and more enjoyable...

do what you feel most comf. with. personally i didn't like a -z order -- too predictable for the kids and e/i are too close as a pp mentioned.

now that i'm in 1, i can guess that all of the vowels were taught too closely for my class b/c all of the kids have each vowel confused for another - it is very frustrating.

safe your self time and google the big companies like harcourt brace, houghton mifflin and scott foresman - see which order they go in and modify it to your needs

:)

Re: Kindergarten Teachers

Thank you for all the replies, help, and suggestions!

Re: Kindergarten Teachers

I work with hearing impaired kids...so I teach the easiest sounds first.
But we also use this program called Letterland which is really great for phonemic awareness...all the letters are a character, like Annie Apple and she says...
The kids get a kick out of it and it makes learning fun.