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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.