You may have a class full of advanced kindergartners.  Or you may have a class full of struggling ones.  More than likely, however, your class is full of all sorts of kids at all sorts of levels -- some who have known letters and sounds for years and others who are just beginning to make sense of them.  Not a problem.  If you focus on what’s important and teach your kindergartners what they really need to know to write well, you can amaze all the people following their progress this year, especially their parents and your principal!


Tip 1:  Help your kids learn to break up words and write the sounds they hear in the order they hear them.

Learning to hear a word and segment it into parts is crucial to becoming a writer.  For your kids to begin writing their thoughts down on paper, they must first understand how to hear a word, break it into its individual sound parts, and represent each sound heard with the appropriate letters.  For instance, when they hear the word "cat," they need to be able to immediately break it into /c/ /a/ /t/, hearing each sound that makes up the word.  Naturally, they'll need to know the letters that represent each sound as well...and be able to write them properly as well.

But my kids don’t even know letters and sounds yet!  When should I get them segmenting...and how?
If you want your kids to become great writers by the end of the school year, you should definitely start working on segmenting with your kids as soon as possible, preferably by the third full week of school -- even if you have kids who come in with very little letter/sound knowledge.  If you are following the Kinders Can! READ and WRITE! letter order, this is easy to do.  You will start blending and segmenting words that use the letters you have reviewed and/or focused on so far (t, o, and p).  That means that even the kids who only know the letters you have officially gone over will be able to start blending and segmenting right away, reading and writing the words top, pot, tot, and pop!  This will help them begin to understand how letters and sounds work together to make words.  Each week will further this understanding as you continue to blend and segment new words utilizing all of the letters and sounds you have officially covered.  As more and more letters/sounds have been covered, even your least exposed kids should be able to read more and more words with ease.  If you also include a daily alphabet review and a number of other activities that go over important letter/sound information throughout the day (read Kinders Can! READ and WRITE! for more information on how to do this), you should really see your kids take off!

Regardless of the program and/or letter order you are using, make sure you get your kids blending and segmenting with whatever letters and sounds they have learned, and do your best to cover all of the letters and sounds as quickly as possible so that a lack of letter/sound knowledge doesn't hold them back.

All of my kids already know letters and sounds.  What should I do?
If your kids come to you already knowing letters and sounds, you can bypass going over letters and sounds each week, and jump right into teaching your students how to put their letter/sound knowledge to use!  Right away, you’ll want to introduce them to blending and segmenting all sorts of consonant-vowel-consonant words.  Ideally, you’ll want to choose words that utilize all of the letters of the alphabet.  This will help your kids get a good review of letters and sounds as they learn to blend and segment them. (For free word cards, go to www.KidsCanReadandWrite.com!)

What if my kids are having trouble blending and/or segmenting?
As you go over how to put sounds together and break them apart, make sure you help your kids gain a good blending/segmenting technique.  This is key to the reading/writing process.  Your goal should be to help your kids actually hear what they are saying as they blend sounds together.  I like to have my kids "punch" the first sound (say it loudly and clearly by itself), drag out the middle sound (say it for longer), and quickly but a little more quietly add on the ending.  In other words, if my kids were reading the word hop, they would say, "/h/ /oooo/p/, hop!"  When first teaching them how to sound out words, I would help them sound out the word three times as a group before putting it together.  This helps everyone learn to blend more effectively, and gives your confused kids more time to understand what everyone is doing to get the correct word.  As your kids get the hang of how to sound out words quickly and efficiently, however, take your voice out completely and begin to have them sound out each word only once. 

Getting kindergartners reading and writing by the end of the school year is really a very simple task -- if you teach them in a way they can easily understand and follow.  Of course, those with significant learning disabilities are bound to struggle and may take a bit longer.  But your average kids, and even your below average kids, should be able to learn to read and write in kindergarten with relative ease.  And your above average and highly gifted kids should catch on in a snap!

When I say your kids should be able to read and write by the end of kindergarten, I mean that they should be able to pick up any little trade book they want to read and begin figuring out what it says.  Think:  The Little Engine That Could, Are You My Mother, If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, Curious George, etc.  And they should be able to write whatever comes to mind so that others can read it.

Yes, some of your kids are bound to be more fluent when reading whatever trade book they pick up than others, but ALL of your kids (except for those with significant learning issues) should be able to figure out the words on the page and understand the message behind them.  And, yes, some of your kids will have better spelling, spacing, and punctuation habits than others, but ALL of them (except for those with significant learning issues) should be able to express themselves through words and sentences -- without having to copy words off of a word wall or ask for help to write what they want to say.  In fact, most of my kindergarten students wrote full-page stories each day for the last few months of school.  And they did so ALL BY THEMSELVES!  You can get your kids to do this on their own as well!

The key is to use your time wisely and to teach everyone what they need to know to read and write new and/or unfamiliar words.  Making them learn lists of "sight words" won't do it.  Either will having them copy sentences off the board or word wall.  Busywork won't either.  Nor will coloring sheets. Or cute t.v. programs.

Instead, you'll have to use your precious time to teach them what they really need to know -- letters, sounds, blending and segmenting techniques, phonetic "tricks," and some of the most common "outlaw" words.  And you'll need to show them how to use all this knowledge to read and write real text.  While doing so, you'll need to work on improving their background knowledge and vocabulary.  And, no doubt, you'll have to work on their comprehension skills as well.  But when done in a systematic, methodical way, you can do all this AND have fun with your kids at the same time.

You can talk with them.  Read to them.  Teach new songs and cheers to them. 

You can get them writing fun stories, and can enjoy listening to them read them aloud to you afterward.

You can create with them, make food with them, solve problems with them.

You can do science experiments and discover all sorts of new facts about the world we live in with them.

And, if you've really used your time wisely, you can send them on to their first grade teachers fully capable of reading and writing just about anything they can get their hands on or think up!  What's more, you can send them on with lots of real world knowledge and problem solving skills as well.

Interested?  Read the new, fully updated edition of Kinders Can!  READ and WRITE!   It will walk you through exactly what you need to do to get your kindergarten students reading and writing this year.  Go to www.KindersCanReadandWrite.com to get your digital copy TODAY!

Wishing you all the best and much success,
Katy Huller

www.KindersCanReadandWrite.com

I was listening to Professor Randy Pausch deliver his “last lecture” on “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” the other day.  He was talking about how much football meant to him as a kid, and how his coach hadn’t brought any footballs to practice one day. 

The kids were all baffled.  Weren’t they going to have practice? 

As he retells it, one brave soul finally spoke up, pointing out that there weren’t any footballs.  The coach was nonplussed.  “We don’t need any footballs,” he replied  matter-of-factly.  He then asked the kids how many people were on a football field at a time. 

Twenty-two, they figured out. 

“How many people touch the football at any given time?” the coach followed. 

“One,” they quickly responded. 

 “Right,” he said.  “So we’re going to work on what those other 21 guys are doing!”

Randy Pausch said he got the message loud and clear – fundamentals were (and still are) important.  Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.

“You’ve got to get the fundamentals down,” Randy Pausch said.  “Because  otherwise, the fancy stuff isn’t going to work.”

I thought about this for a minute, and realized that the same can be said about teaching kids to read and write.  They simply must have the fundamentals if the “fancy stuff” (fluency, comprehension skills, etc.) is going to work.