Our youngest students spent the first 6 weeks of school playing many games where they worked on identifying the sounds of letters in our alphabet. After giving them all a letter/sound assessment in October (see above) we decided they were ready to start a class we call Blend-it. This class focuses on teaching children how to blend sounds to make words. We started with objects representing sounds: apple = a, bear = b, comb = c, ring = r, turtle=t. They started with the –at family of words and quickly grasped the concept. Then they worked on the –ad word family and –an word family. To further practice this skill they are working on a blend-it packet and are playing games such as Fat Cat, Memory, Bingo and Go-fish.