i tutor a kindergarten student with significant visual processing and visual discrimination disability. rather than repeating the same activities his non ld classmates have, i am looking for activities modified for this student’s needs, to strengthen the areas of weakness or lean extra on other areas where he can compensate. has any one else had this issue come up and found a resource they can direct me towards? we only have a couple of months till school ends so i’m feeling pressed.
Re: needed...alphabet/phonics activities for a kindergartene
More ideas in line with Sara’s:
Get a large 3-ring binder and some poster-weight cardboard. Do one letter a day (and you can finish by the end of school and have time for review.)
On the first page,
— make the *lower-case* letter a tactilely by drawing it with a glue pen, or a popsicle stick cut flat and dipped in glue, then sprinkling on glitter or coloured sand. Or cut it out of nice tactile cloth like velvet scraps and glue it on the page. Make the letter two or three inches high, towards the top of the page.
— on or beside the letter (gold ink marker will work on glitter or cloth), draw a small dot for the place to start tracing, and arrows to guide the hand motions
— below the letter, make three large circles about three inches in diameter. In the first, draw or paste a picture of an apple (for the “short a” sound). In the second, a picture of an apron (for “long a”). In the third, a picture of an arm (for “broad a”)
Do all this work *with* the child — he can help you, if not with the fine cutting and tracing, at least with handing you tools and placing things on the page and sprinkling glitter.
Once the page is done, “read” it — The letter’s name, “ay”, the letter’s m,ost common sound, “ah”, trace the letter (start under the middle line, back over and aroubnd the circle, slide up to the middle line again, and down and done!), name the three code words and their sounds — ah for apple, ay for apron, and aw for arm.
Then punch the page with the three-hole punch and put it in the binder.
Day 2, do a page in the same format for b and review a, reading over the whole page as above..
Day 3, do a page for c (“k” as in cat and “s” as in circle), and review a and b.
If you run out of the alphabet before the end of the year, you have sh, ch, th, ng, oo, ow, and so on.
After the child has a good grip on ten or more letters, start writing short CVC words in coloured marker on file cards and decoding them. Use pretty colours of markers and cards and boxes to make this all attractive. Build up a word box. Practice decoding the word, tracing the word, copying the word, and writing the word without looking. If time permits, you can get to other patterns beyond CVC.
The multisensory approach, the sense of building something for yourself, and the continuous and cumulative review of this method work wonders.
Get puzzle letters of the alphabet and let him play with those. Make letters of the alphabet out of playdough and take turns closing your eyes and guessing which letter is it. (start with the easy ones) Give him shaving cream and let him draw the letters with shaving cream. Take really big pieces of cardboard and cut them into the shapes of the letters and let him paint them, carry them around, take them home, put them on his wall, and crawl right through the O.