As kindergarten teachers, so much of our day is focused on phonemic awareness skills that will lay the foundation for reading. Our students must learn many foundational skills long before they are ready to read. Today, I want to take a closer look at part of this process and talk about progressing from letter sounds to CVC words.
Build a Solid Foundation First
Before we dive into starting CVC words, let’s talk about the order of operations in phonemic awareness. Step number one in this process is letter identification. Before you work with sounds, students must recognize both uppercase and lowercase letters. Kindergarteners will be working on this throughout the first third of the year, but as a general rule of thumb, you want to have a firm foundation here to start. Be sure to check out this post on ways to teach letter recognition if you need to work on this skill in your room.
Next comes letter sounds. This is where the fun begins in my opinion! I love watching as the lightbulbs go off and my students begin to learn all of the letter sounds. We play a variety of games, use center activities, and even digital lessons to master letter sounds. This is something that must be practiced in depth before you move on to CVC words, so make sure your students get plenty of opportunities to practice before moving on. If students don’t have a solid foundation in these two skills first, you’ll notice a lot of struggling and frustration with CVC words, so be sure to take your time in this area!
Moving on to CVC Words
Alright, you’ve done the work and now you’re ready to start progressing from letter sounds to CVC words. This is where the magic of learning to blend sounds and read words begins.
This is one of my favorite skills to teach because it’s when my students begin to read words for the first time. This is SO exciting!
I do most of my teaching on this in small groups to allow for individualized attention and support. Although this is exciting, it can be tricky for some, so the small group teaching format is a must!
In my room, I like to use a collection of small group games to teach and practice blending sounds. Inside this Blending Games resource, there are 11 different games. Each game includes options for 2 phonemes, 3 phonemes, 4 phonemes, and compound words / syllables.
Since there are so many different options, these activities serve us well as we begin the process of progressing from letter sounds to CVC words. Not to mention, the games are engaging and fun for my students, so they don’t even realize they are learning! With options like BINGO, Feed Me, and SWAT, there’s a ton of great activities to choose from.
Blending Letters in Action
One of my favorites for when we are just beginning with blending is called “Blender it Up”. The idea behind this game is that students will listen to the sounds the teacher says and then slowly blend them to form the word.
To play, each child gets a blender cut-out with dots on it to represent the number of phonemes in the words we’re working with. The teacher uses cards with a word list and will say sounds aloud for a specific word. Students will tap the dots on the blender for each sound and then blend the sounds to make the word. And. . . if you want to take it a step further you can have the kids find a letter tile or magnetic letter for each sound and place them on the dots.
This is a great activity to model how to blend letter sounds with students. I model a couple of examples and then my small group completes a few words together. Once students have the hang of the activity and understand the blending concept, then we move forward with more words as a group or independently.
Like the other activities, this game comes with words that have 2, 3, and 4 phonemes as well as compound words so we’re able to play it multiple times throughout the year. We start with 2 phonemes and gradually increase as the students master this skill. Once the students start blending on their own, they are excited to continue. It’s a fun process to observe!
Try Some Free Blending Games
Want to test these activities out in your room? You can grab some free Blending Games! This is a great opportunity to test out the small group game format as you progress from letter sounds to CVC words.
CVC Word Families
Once my students are blending letter sounds seamlessly, much of our phonics activities are centered around CVC word families. We work through word families with short vowels to continue practicing the skill of blending sounds. In kindergarten, most everything builds upon the prior lesson, so we do a lot of repeating similar activities with new skills. This is great for my students because they come to expect certain tasks and can be independent with them.
A great example of this is my Cover it Up Word Families Worksheets. These no-prep activities we designed to practice CVC words in a fun and engaging format. I use them almost exclusively as a warm-up tool in my small groups.
I love these activities because the students can work on them independently as we complete the transition to a new small group or center. As a new group approaches my table, I lay down a page for each child that matches what we most recently worked on. Then, as they take a seat at the table, they know just what to do! They take a look at the word family at the top of the page and then use a bingo dabber, crayons, or some kind of manipulative to cover up the pictures that represent words in that family.
These are wonderful for a quick warm-up review before we begin our small group lesson for the day. Plus, they give me a chance to get organized for my group while they practice. I also love that these pages serve as a quick, informal assessment. I can easily glance at the page and see how my kiddos are doing with that particular set of CVC words. All-in-all, these pages make it super super simple to get some more CVC word practice into our day.
Interactive Notebook Activities for CVC Words
Another way that we learn new word families is with interactive notebooks. As a kindergarten teacher, I am a huge fan of interactive notebooks because they have so many amazing benefits. They’re engaging, great for fine motor practice, easy to adapt to any skill, and maintain a record of what we’ve been working on. I mean really, what’s not to love?!
That’s exactly why I love these Word Family Interactive Notebooks for CVC words! These notebooks are jam-packed with 22 different activities for each short vowel family. Since there are so many options to choose from, you can select the ones that work best for your group. Some of the activities included are:
- Sort by Word Family
- Roll, Write, Graph
- Spin, Write, Graph
- Real & Not Real Pockets
- Building Words
- Highlight then Trace
- Complete a Sentence and many more!
Students will cut out the pages, complete the activity, and then glue them down into a notebook. I love this because when they are finished, they have a whole notebook filled with everything they worked on. It’s fun to flip through and look at the progression. In the bundle, you get 22 different sets of word family activities for short vowels. In my room, we work on one word family per week. These hands-on learning activities make it fun and easy to learn CVC words!
Learning CVC Words is Fun!
Now that I’ve shown you some of the activities we use in my room to progress from letter sounds to CVC words, I want to leave you with some practical advice. No matter what methods and activities you choose to use in your room for this skill, remember. . . mix it up! I have found in my room that using a variety of activities like the ones shown here helps appeal to my variety of learners.
Some of my kids LOVE small group games more than anything else, while others enjoy the process of cutting and gluing their interactive notebook pieces. By using variety, you’re going to ensure that there’s something out there for everyone.
Another important thing to remember is patience. I know you already know this, but learning to read can be hard for some kiddos. Making the leap from letter sounds to blending takes time and patience at times.
Keeping your teaching material light and fun is a great way to reduce the pressure that some children feel and remind them that learning CVC words is supposed to be fun! The more fun we can make our reading activities, the more likely our students are to thrive!
So, as you embark on this journey of progressing from letter sounds to CVC words, have fun with it! And don’t forget, if you need fun and engaging resources to use in your classroom, you can find all of these and more in my TPT shop.
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This post makes progressing from letter sounds to CVC words fun and easy! Make sure to pin it on Pinterest so that you can come back to it when you’re ready to begin these lessons in your room.
