Kindergarten Alphabet Activities That
You and Your Students Will LOVE!!

Teaching young children kindergarten alphabet activities should be a major focus of a kindergarten teacher's literacy program.

I recently spoke to my friend and teaching colleague, Valerie, about her literacy program. Valerie has many years of kindergarten teaching experience. I consider her to be an expert in teaching kindergarten.

Here are a few of the alphabet activities that she passed on to me that she has found to be highly successful.

1. Children love to play Bingo games. These Bingo games can be in many different forms, including Alphabet Bingo, Number Bingo, Colour and Shape Bingo.

These games are used to develop quick recall and are also good for developing social skills, since you can often pair a junior and a senior kindergarten student together. These games are also great for peer tutoring.

2. In order to teach letter recognition, letter form and letter sounds, kindergarten teachers can incorporate a program called "Jolly Phonics".

Each time the children learn a letter, they are provided with a sound, an action and a verse which helps them remember that specific letter.

It works quite effectively, and is fun for them. They really remember the actions, which in turn, helps them to recall a particular letter.

3. In order to reinforce letter recognition and letter sound, Valerie regularly uses an alphabet book entitled "The ABC's in Rhyme, Chant and Song" by Houghton Mifflin - "a resource for developing phonemic awareness and phonics".

It's a big book that the kids quite enjoy. It's also good for listening skills, choral reading, word recognition, etc.

4. A great way to teach children high frequency words is with a reading program that Valerie has been using and revising over the last few years.

The program is called "High Frequency Readers" and it's by Scholastic. It comes with a Teacher's Book, Workbook and Take-Home Book. There are 18 big books and a set of 6 corresponding little books for each of the big books.

Valerie develops a word wall using these words. Each time the children learn a new word, she gives them a copy of it to cut out and keep in a word bag (which they will take home at the end of the year). The children can take the words out and practice reading them, and practice making sentences from them (whole or part).

It's a lot of fun to have them make up a partial sentence, read it out loud and fill in the missing word(s) on the spot.

They actually get very good at doing this. They may also want to practice reading the little books regularly on their own, with a partner, or as a group.

Use these kindergarten alphabet activities and I'm sure that you'll be on your way to becoming a successful kindergarten teacher.

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