Working with Word Cards

Today I worked individually with kindergarten students in the hallway on word cards. A word card is a flash card with a single word on it. The student must read the word correctly before I can turn to the next card.

The first student I worked with said that every word was “have” except for the colors. However, once we got to the word “have”, he had trouble recognizing it. He was guessing and became very frustrated because his guesses were not correct. It was a challenge to find different ways to help him read the word cards. I used a combination of techniques. First, I asked him to say all of the letters in the word and the sounds associated with each letter. That is where I realized that he does not know all of his letters or sounds. Therefore, we did a quick review of letters and sounds, but he continued to say each word was “have” even if there were no similar letters. Consequently, I took the “have” flash card out of the pile. Every time he said the word was “have” I showed him the “have” card. Then I asked, does this look like the word have? That seemed to work the best because once he realized the word wasn’t “have”, we sounded out the word together and he was able to identify it.

The other student I worked with mixed up his b’s and d’s. When I asked him to sound out the words, he had difficulty. However, once I asked him to sound out the words out loud to me, he was able to identify the words. This confirmed my theory that a person understands what he/she is reading when he/she reads it out loud.