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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
Halloween is every kindergartner’s favorite holiday; spooky costumes, pumpkin decorating, and all the candy you can eat! As a teacher, you can harness the power of the holiday for your reading centers with these Halloween ending sound clip cards. Your students will love the spiders and the pumpkins and will master their ending sound skills so they can use these cards over and over again!
Why Your Students Need Phonological Awareness
Kindergarten is the time when students master the basic skills of reading that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Firstly, they’ll master their letters and the sounds they can make, and then move onto digraphs and phonemes – the letter combinations that make certain sounds. The ability of segmenting words into these building blocks is called phonological awareness, and your students have to master it to be able to blend multi-syllable words together. It starts with skills like finding the ending sound in short CVC words and goes on to rhyming and letter substitution skills.
Preparing Your Halloween Literacy Center
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These clip cards can be printed as they are to instantly create your new Halloween literacy center, or print 4 to a page to make a small deck for each student to be able practice independently. In either case, laminating them always makes sense so you have them on hand for Halloween holidays for years to come.
How To Use Halloween Ending Sound Clip Cards
These Halloween literacy cards are easy to use; simply show the student the picture and have them identify the object. They then have 3 choices for the ending letter to pick from. This could be done as a teacher-led activity or as an independent check-in. To take this activity further, try one of these extensions:
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Create a writing station – all of these clip cards have 3 sound segments that are clearly audible. Students should be able to sound out the beginning consonant, the middle vowel, and the ending sound and write each word down. This helps them begin their own spelling journey as well as providing opportunities for you to review appropriate letter formation and size.
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Play a rhyming game – another key skill to develop phonological awareness is to have students begin to think about rhyming with the ending sound. This skill requires them to know what sound each short vowel makes in a CVC word as well as broadening their vocabulary to think of similar words that have the same vowel and ending consonant sound. A great game to play is to have students think of as many rhyming words with the Halloween literacy card as possible and then bounce between the students until you’ve collected all the rhymes they have. You can choose whether to allow nonsense words or not!
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Make a matching task – finally, most of these Halloween ending sound clip cards have a matching pair within the deck. You can have students read the set of cards out loud and then find as many matches as they can. A bonus challenge would be for students to create cards that would match any singleton cards in the deck.
This game is also available as digital Boom Cards which can be used with Seesaw, Google Classroom and other distance learning platforms. Grab these Internet task cards here.
More Themed Centers Perfect for Halloween:
My Halloween Themed Centers is a variety pack of 10 games focused on early literacy, math, and fine motor skills.
These are the games included:
1) Witch Sight Word Spells – 40 pre-primer word cards provided with themed letter cards to form the sight words
2) Werewolf Spin and Cover Letters – alphabet divided into 5 different playing mats
3) Spider Web Sight Word Match – match the spider to its web to work on recognition of the pre-primer sight words
4) Trick or Treat Tracing – develop pre-writing fine motor skills with 15 different tracing patterns
5) Graveyard Alphabet Match – pair up the letter ghosts with their tombstones
6) Frankenstein Ten Frame Matching – big version and file folder version included
7) Candy Counting Mats to 10 – trick or treat themed counting mats that you can use with playdough or any counting manipulative
8) Count and Write to 10 – flashcards that can be used for counting the objects and then learning to write the number words
9) Measurement Cards – grab a ruler and record the lengths of 12 different creatures on the answer sheet provided
10) Halloween Treats Emotions Sorting Mats – 6 different sets of treats with 6 different emotions included
Check it out in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Fun Books for Halloween:
Other Halloween Printables You’ll Love:
1) Halloween Worksheet Pack – Lots of Halloween treats await your students in this fun-filled activity packet. 50 pages of literacy, math and fine motor practice inside!
2) Halloween Shadow Matching – Preschoolers need visual discrimination and matching skills in order to differentiate between the letters and numbers and to be able to classify objects. This Halloween shadow matching game develops these early literacy and math skills.
3) Werewolf Spin and Cover Letters – Learning to recognize letters is made fun and easy with this spin and cover game. Kids will be howling like a werewolf with excitement as they race to find all the letters on their mat.
4) Halloween Themed Centers –10 fun Halloween-themed literacy and math centers for preschool and kindergarten. No tricks, only treats, in this pack!
Educational Tools For Your Classroom:
Browse My Most Popular Literacy Activites:
1) Valentines Alphabet Clip Strips – Kids will choose among 5 different letters on the strip to identify the matching ones.
2) Alphabet Beginning Sound Coloring Pages – Watch your child become more familiar with each letter of the alphabet as they practice coloring in the objects with that beginning sound.
3) Tommy Turkey’s Alphabet Pie – This turkey-themed letter recognition activity is so simple to prep and makes a great file folder game!
4) Pirate Alphabet Playdough Mats – Just print out the playing mats and ask your child to form the letters out using the playdough provided.
5) Farm Alphabet Find and Cover Letters – Work on letter recognition any time of the year!
6) Werewolf Spin and Cover – Kids will race to find all the letters on their mat this Halloween.
7) Bunny Burrows Game – Fun game for small groups or circle time where students will catch a bunny and say out the sound.
8) Letter-saurus Fossil Digging – Dinosaur lovers will enjoy being a pretend paleontologist and finding all the letters.
9) Alphabet Handwriting Worksheets – Practice lowercase and capital letters with these print-and-go pages.
10) Rainy Day Alphabet – 1 printable, many ways to use.
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