My rather large kindergarten class isn’t phonics based. We aren’t trying to do reading level work since we only have a few hours a week and far too many children to give individual attention. As such, most of the students can’t read. While they can recognize a few hundred items in English and can hold short conversations in English, there isn’t any reading going on in class. Basic letter recognition is all we’ve gone through, and even then, most of my students only know capital letters.
As such, when I wanted to get a game of Memory cards going, I needed to find an appropriate set of cards to use. I went through the cards we had at work to find a set that had the the letters written in pairs, one for upper case and one lower case, with the opposite side having a colorful picture that started with that letter. I put the picture side up for the class, and their task was to find the letters hidden underneath.
Then, to reinforce phonics learning, I would exaggerate the sounds when someone would choose a picture. That way when I turned over the card, they should have heard what the letter looks like. If they were waffling between choosing to card pictures, I would say the words with extra emphasis on the beginning letter once again for help.
The pre-readers that knew most of the shapes and sounds of the letters really did well. Their memories and ability to discover the letters other students turned over but made a mistake with meant that by the end of the game they had a five to one card advantage in most cases. The students that didn’t know the letters were simply turning things over at random and were really kind of amazed that there was a phonetic connection between two pictures of different things.
