Learning to Read in Kindergarten

At Rowntree Montessori Schools, our Kindergarten students have been hard at work learning to read! When you come visit our classroom, you can see the students using many different methods to help them in their reading journey. During our language time, we have been focusing on our beginning phonetic sounds. Phonics in our classrooms, is the practice of teaching children the sounds made by individual letter or letter groups (for example, the letter “c” makes a k sound), and teaching Kindergarten students how to merge separate sounds together to make one word (for example, blending the sounds c, a, t makes CAT).

Kindergarten Montessori schools learning about letter sounds at Rowntree Montessori Schools private school in Brampton — Kindergarten Montessori students learning about letter sounds while reading small words

We use many different methods to teach phonics, as we find the Kindergarten students learn the best when shown visually, with a manipulative and written resource. In order for a child to learn how to spell any word correctly, he or she must be able to recognize the sounds of the letters used in forming the words. At RMS, our teachers want to make sure all of our Kindergarten students feel confident and are well on their way to learning to read by the end of the school year. This is why learning to read is a daily focus that is utilized in all subject areas, not just language time!

Kindergarten student learning to read using worksheets — Student using workbook independently

When a Kindergarten student is taught phonics, the child will be able to recognize sounds in words, and will be able to spell the words correctly. We always start our language time with a circle that introduces the letter and phonetic sound. We use our Montessori moveable letters to build small words with the specific phonetic sound. We also look through text to find words that have the same beginning letters, which also helps increase a child’s fluency in reading. The students enjoy making a visual list of words that have the same beginning sound when they are learning to read. We then go over the proper way to print both the upper and lower case letters using the whiteboard. To cement any new reading concepts in the minds of our Kindergarten students, we finish with working in our workbooks on pages that connect with what was taught during circle time. It is amazing to see our students working so hard, and some of them are already reading small three letter words! Learning phonics is very important at Rowntree Montessori Schools in helping children to learn how to spell words.