Shopping for Sounds!

    So I completely lost a day yesterday and forgot all about posting my Crafty Tuesday post. How sad. It has just been one of those weeks... The past two nights, as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was out COMPLETELY, until the next morning...Craziness.
    Anyhow.... back to the learning fun at home. The little munchkin has a fairly good grasp on beginning sounds, and as I skimmed through the book  "Words Their Way" by Donald R. Bear, Marcia A. Invernizzi, Shane Templeton and Francine Johnston at Barnes & Noble (cuz there was no way I was going to buy that expensive book), I took some notes.
     I understand the importance of phonemic awareness in early childhood, but my knowledge as to how to actually teach reading is a whole different ball game for me. So I took note that before children begin to emerge into early reading, there needs to be a strong grasp on the different aspects of phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is this ability to take words apart, to put them back together again, and to change them to something else. 
     As an Early Childhood teacher and mom, I have been on top of this since last summer when she first started showing interest in letters.
    One of the first things we did last summer, was begin learning the different letter sounds. I bought these Alphabet Soup Sorting Cans and have used them in a few different ways to teach her beginning sounds.

    We used them to learn beginning sounds and learned to name, label and spell items with letter tiles.

    So, now that I know that she can identify all of the letter sounds, I know I have to reinforce the learning of each inital letter sound.. (We will work with middle and ending sounds soon).

I brought the Soup Cans out of the garage and made a fun Beginning Sounds Sort game for her:

She went "shopping" for her cans:

And then I dumped all the pictures out and scattered them on a piece of paper. 

She said each name and sorted the pictures onto the correct side.

(She needed very little assistance in doing this)

    And THEN, we made it even more fun and used some of her pretend play food. Instead of sorting sounds into groups, she picked items and placed them in one of four circle shaped papers and then found the letter card that matched the item.

   So, we turned letter/sound identification and beginning sound sort work into lots of fun with our pretend play props!