Kindergarten Q & A: Words and Letters

A masterful teacher friend recently told me she is working with a team of teachers to make their district's already strong kindergarten literacy program even stronger. She asked me to weigh in on two questions the team was grappling with, questions that concerned the use of sight words for writing and the pace of introducing letters. An edited version of our question and answer conversation is below.

Using Writing Words in Kindergarten
First, a bit of background. Kid Writing, the creation of Isabell Cardonick, Eileen Feldgus, and Richard Gentry, is an early literacy program that integrates phonology, spelling, phonics, reading and writing. I think it’s brilliant. Others think so, too, and I know a number of teachers who have used it for the bulk of their literacy instruction.

Kindergarten Kid Writing in action

The program provides many student-centered tools, including Writing Words (often called Crown Words). These words  - for example my, are, is, am, and said – are frequently used by young writers when they write on topics of their choosing. To help children store these difficult to decode words in their brain dictionary, each sight word is paired with an engaging, rhyming picture. Examples are shown below. After a word is taught, a teachers posts the word on the wall where young writers can easily find it and then use it when writing.

 Writing Words in a classroom

QUESTION       
​“Do we keep our Kid Writing Words or get rid of them? We weren't sure if they went along with recent brain research / Science of Reading.”
 
ANSWER
I say keep the Kid Writing Words (Crown Words) and feel good about it! Here’s why. As we know from research, kindergarten spelling-writing-reading is developmental. We’ve known this for many years now, well before the term “science of reading” was bandied about.  For kindergarten students, most word spellings are of a temporary nature. A kindergartener’s incorrect spellings, most often guided solely by sounds, are of a temporary nature and will eventually be replaced by correct spellings, which are made perfect and permanent through repetition and practice.
 
Kindergarten teachers don’t need to worry that sound-spelling patterns don’t match, for example that the /ar/ sound spelling in ARE doesn’t match the /ar/ sound spelling in STAR. I’d say that kindergarten word spellings typically occur at the sound-letter level rather than at the sound-pattern level. 
 
Finally, two other  reason you can feel good about keeping your writing words is that 1) the words foster independence (instead of asking a teacher how to spell a word like said, a child goes to the wall, finds the writing word, and spells it from there), and 2) the associations children make between the fun pictures and “tricky” words really help them remember the spellings. It’s the power of mnemonics! 
 
If you want to fine tune your Writing Words to be more closely connected to patterns, you could replace one or two of the rhyming non-pattern words with rhyming pattern words. The PIE of MY comes to mind. How about swapping that out for the SKY of MY (showing the word MY floating in a blue field with puffy white clouds)? Or instead of the CLAY of THEY or the HAY of THEY, use The HEY of THEY (show someone shouting instead of a haystack).
 
Here’s another thought: While it is true that a few words - like OF, SAID, and WAS – have no analogous sound-pattern words, many sight words are pattern-based, can be presented with any number of analogous words, and will, at some point in a teaching sequence, become fully decodable. So don’t be afraid to show other pattern words when you teach these types of “sight words.” For example, later in the year when you review the Sky of My, show the words by, fly, and cry. Here the expectation is not mastery and permanent mapping but simple exposure. This practice goes hand in hand with your team’s move to group, present, and teach sight words that follow patterns (for example, me, we, he, be, she). I’m a big fan of this type of teaching because the human brain is a pattern recognition machine and so it makes sense to harness pattern recognition when teaching sight words.

Grouping writing words - check out "The Keys of E"

 Introducing and Teaching Letters and Sounds
Again, before getting to the Q & A, a bit of background is called for. For the last eight or nine years, I have known kindergarten teachers who begin their school year with an Alphabet Boot Camp, a program for introducing all letters of the alphabet one letter per day. While I can’t speak to the general efficacy of the ABC Bootcamp program (look it up on the Kindergarten Smorgasboard website), I can speak to research that provides strong evidence that a letter-a-week pace is much too slow and a routine that teaches a letter-a-day is much more effective (see Jones & Reutzel, 2012, and Mcay & Teale, 2015, among others). In addition, there is long-standing research that shows the sequence in which you introduce letters can influence how easily and thoroughly letters and their associated sounds are learned.
 
QUESTION       
Is the "Boot Camp" necessary? And how many letters per week should we teach?
We are leaning towards just starting with teaching 2 letters each week (and possibly 3 as they are getting the hang of letters) with the goal of mastering letter names and sounds by around January. Also, we are looking at how the letters are taught in our Journeys curriculum. In the first 5 weeks of Journeys they do a letter each day - kind of like a letter "Boot Camp" - and then switch to one letter each week. It then takes all year to go through all the letters.”
 
ANSWER 
If I was teaching kindergarten, I’d do the Boot Camp and then use the brisk pace of teaching you mentioned. Let's say you did the Boot Camp in October and then taught all the letters at a pace of 2-3 letters per week. The Boot Camp will prime the kids, exposing them to the entire alphabet in only one month, and the 2-3 letters per week introduction will allow deeper learning and practice to take place the next two to four months (depending on whether you teach 2 or 3 letters a week). This then provides the possibility of using the remaining 2 to 5 months to fine tune letters-sounds that weren’t mastered and dig into patterns, starting with CVC words and also incorporating digraphs. 
 
And since we’re on the topic, you may want to put a bug in your district’s ear about the sequence. If I remember the Journeys sequence correctly, I’m not the biggest fan. It unfolds (like you said) with a letter per month (too slow!), doesn’t introduce a second vowel (letter i) until about halfway through the sequence, and places the X and J before E, which I think is downright odd. Perhaps I have this wrong. If I have it right, you could keep the Journeys sequence but move letters around to make it more effective.

FYI and BTW, here’s the sequence from UFLI (University of Florida Literacy Institute) - I’ve become a fan! It starts out like Journeys but then gets interesting (and more effective):
 
a, m, s, t, VC/CVC, p, t, f, i, n, CVC (with a, i), an/am, o, d, c, u, g, b, e, s (s), s(z), k, h, r, l, w, j, y, x, qu, v, z

In Conclusion
In kindergarten, as you seek to more effectively teach letters, sounds, and words in kindergarten, all of which are used by young children to spell, write, and read, consider these following thoughts:

• Teach writing words directly, explicit, and systematically.
• Kid Writing Words, which pair sight words for reading with color pictures of rhyming words (mnemonic devices) are an effective tool to use for writing, spelling, and reading.
• Stress the decodable elements of sight words, especially beginning letter-sound relationships but also ending letter-sounds associations. Teach young children to "read through the word."
• Group and expose children to words to share a common pattern. 
• Pace of instruction matters. A brisk pace that provides lots of repetition and practice is effective.
• An "Alphabet Boot Camp" at the beginning of K (not necessarily in the first weeks or even month, as kids need to settle in) introduces every letter in the alphabet in the course of 26 days.
• Teaching 2-3 letters a week more effectively teaches letters than a-letter-a-day.
• Introductory sequence of letters matters.
• University of Florida Literacy Institute has an effective sequence.
• Mnemonic devices, including rhyme, chants, and pictures, are useful in teaching because they provide "hooks" for learning.