Introduction to Reading Foundational Skills

-Common Core English Language Arts CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.A-D,2.A-E,3.A-D,4

The Kindergarten Reading Foundational Skills objectives for the Common Core are jam packed with skills the students should learn to begin their reading journey.  What you will find here is a sampling of the Reading Foundational Skills lesson available for purchase at the Teachers Pay Teachers Store.

reading foundationa l skills sight words4

This post contains affiliate links, which means, if you click on one of the links and purchase something, Curious Little Classroom will receive a commission on your purchase at no extra cost to you!

The books we used to begin this lesson were Z Is for Moose by Kelly Bingham, Alphabet Adventureand Alphabet Mystery, both by Audry Wood, and Rhyme Time: A Book of Rhyming Riddles by Michael Dahl.

Materials List for Reading Foundational Skills

–Reading Foundational Skills lesson
–construction paper
–glue sticks
–bulletin board letters
–3 poster boards
–magnetic uppercase letters

Step 1: Begin by downloading the Reading Foundational Skills lesson and complete the worksheets

Here is a sample page from the 5 worksheets:

Step 2: Set up the Sight Word Matching Game

One of the kindergarten objectives is to begin teaching sight words to the student.  Sight words are high frequency words that may or may not be able to be sounded out, therefore, the student should just memorize them.

We took about 32 common sight words and made a matching game using them.  We glued the word plus a picture clue to a half sheet of construction paper and hung them on the wall.  Then we wrote out the sight words on the other half of the construction paper pieces.

***A side note here-we used Yoobi glue sticks to glue the sight word cards. Yoobi is a great company that follows a one-for-one charity model, similar to TOMS Shoes shoes and Bombas Socks.  The company gives supplies to a school in need every time you purchase from them.  Click this link to read more about the Yoobi story.***

reading foundationa l skills sight words5  reading foundationa l skills sight words6

The lesson contains detailed instructions for setting up the cards.

reading foundationa l skills sight words1 reading foundationa l skills sight words2

Here is what the cards should look like when complete.

reading_foundational_skills_sight_words3_new

Step 3: Play the sight word matching game by matching the sight words with the pictures on the construction paper

Jack had to use the written words to match with the sight words on the wall.  For example, the word go was on the wall with a picture of a green traffic light.  He had to match it up to get some experience seeing what these sight words look like.

Here is Jack playing the sight word matching game.

This was really hard for Jack and he was getting frustrated.  I decided it was best to go over the pictures and words with him first before having him continue the game.

As you can see in the picture below, Jack was not into doing this.  I was patient with him and let him decide when he wanted to get going on the game.  It actually took a few days to get through all the words, and that is ok, it is actually exactly how I wanted it to go so he didn’t fee

We put check marks on the cards that Jack matched correctly.

Here is Jack trying to find the matches for the word “no.”

Step 4: Set up the letter scavenger hunt by hiding the bulletin board letters and making your poster boards, or fill in the table in the Sight word and letter scavenger hunt FREE pdf

The next thing we did was set up a letter scavenger hunt.

reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds

Here we are going over the poster boards we made for the letter scavenger hunt.

Here are some pics of where the letters were hidden in our yard.

reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds2 reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds3

Here is Jack telling me the sound of the first letters he found in the scavenger hunt.

Here we are filling in our poster boards for the letter “L.”

Yay!  He found some more letters, we are still filling in our letter sound chart.

reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds4 reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds5

reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds7 reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds6

Jack found the letter “m” and in this video we are filling in the poster boards for that letter.

Step 5: Use magnetic letters to practice sounding out and reading simple CVC words

After a break in the sprinkler, we headed inside and tried to use some of our decoding skills to read CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words using magnetic uppercase letters .

reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds9 reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds8

I asked Jack to find the magnetic letter that makes the sound “c.”

reading foundationalskills k practicing our letter sounds 9

We are practicing decoding our first CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word.

Now we changed the “c” to a “b” to try to read the new CVC word.

Here we changed the last letter in the CVC word instead of the first and tried to decode the new word.

Step 6: Complete the assessment from the Reading Foundational Skills lesson

Here is a sample assessment page from the lesson:

We hope you enjoyed learning to read with us!