I believe that the part of literacy that students have been missing in the last ten years is from good old-fashioned nursery rhymes and phonetic awareness. To begin the year I ask parents to aide their children by assisting them to sound out their name by touching their bodies as they say each sound.  I want students to be able to hear the sounds in words before they begin kid writing and I think the parents in turn need to understand how phonetic awareness and phonics plays such an important step in early literacy skill development.

    I have found pictures of people touching their head, shoulders, waist, hips, knees and toes.  Then I write the word I want the student to sound out at the top of the paper.  (I have asked our Speech and Language teacher to help me with the correct spelling of the sound by its pronunciation.) Next, I write each sound next to the appropriate picture. The first word I start with is their name.  I am sending this paper home with any new word I want students to use in their kid writing sentences for homework.

     We use DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of basic early literacy skills) as our progress monitoring tool for students who fall below the benchmarks on the PALS.  I thought informing parents on early literacy skill development might help my students achieve benchmarks.

    Informing parents on how his/her child begins to write might help parents help their child to learn how to kid write.  I hope by keeping parents informed with the process, we will make greater gains.  Before your child begins writing, have him/her sound out the words that he/she will use in his/her sentence by following the pictures on the " Sound Me Out" poster,

Download the word document here.  (Sound Me Out)

 Have your child draw a picture on their Kid Writing Paper. The picture should be of something that begins with the Letter of the Week which is at the top of the paper.

Take the words from your child’s Kid Writing Word Bag and place them above the Kid Writing Paper. Have your child try to rearrange the words to make a sentence of their own.

After your child has lined up their words, have them begin to copy the words using the pompom as a "Meatball Space" between the words. Then for the words that are in their sentence but that are not in the bag, you must help them sound out and write the letter that represents the sound of the word that they need to write!