Once students know letter names, they're poised to master letter sounds. Yay! We have a set of homework pages to help your little learners take this next step.
Like our Letter Name Fluency (LNF), the first place to start with Letter Sound Fluency (LSF) is assessment. For this test, the students point to a letter and say the sound it makes. The teacher records the students' responses on a assessment sheet. Make a slash mark under each letter sound said correctly. There is room to use this form for 6 times with the same student. I love an easy way to show growth over time!
For Letter Sound Fluency, we've split it into two groups. The first group, Level A, is for students who need practice with individual letter sounds. We're taking on the whole alphabet at once! If the child knows letter names, this shouldn't be an overwhelming step because so many letter names give a clue to the sound they make (H, W, and Y are the big exceptions).
Level B is for beginning digraphs ch, sh, th, and wh. This level begins by having students contrast the digraph sound with the single consonant sounds and then progresses to practicing multiple digraphs together. I've found that digraphs typically come easy to young learners if you give them a little nudge.
The Letter Sound homework has a similar format to our Letter Name pages. There are 2 pages for a week (the student completes 1/2 page per day). Copy the pages back-to-back and you'll only need 1 sheet of paper for a week's homework. Each week has a parent tip that gives directions for completing the assignment, information about the importance of early literacy, or suggestions of easy ways to help students progress.
When it's homework time, the first step is to practice saying a string of letter sounds. On days 1-3, there are 20 letters. On the last day it bumps up to 30. The entire alphabet is covered 2-3 times per week. Any sounds said incorrectly are circled so there's a record of what the child needs to continue practicing.
After saying the sounds, the learner completes a brief activity to help strengthen the letter-sound connection. These activities are unique to the Letter Sound Homework pack.
In the Kindergarten Fluency pack, there are 4 Letter Sound Fluency (LSF) pages. These pages are on Level A (single letter sounds). Our Letter Sound Fluency pack has 12 weeks worth of practice. This includes 8 pages on Level A. These follow the same format as the pages in the Kindergarten pack, but give the letters in different arrangements so you could have students working on both sets without repeating the content. The Letter Sound Fluency pack also contains 4 weeks of practice on Level B (beginning digraphs). These pages are not available in the Kindergarten pack.
You can pick up the Letter Sound Fluency bundle in our Teachers Pay Teachers store.
If you want to sample some pages we have put together a free sampler of Kindergarten fluency pages. It includes 2 pages of Letter Name Fluency, 2 pages of Letter Sound Fluency, 2 pages of Segementing and Blending Fluency, and 4 pages of Reading Fluency passages. Click here to download the sampler.
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Whether or not you use our fluency resources, we hope that this post has provided you with some insight on why fluency is important and how to tackle it with your students.
