Guest post from one of my favorites!

Hi!  Do not adjust your computer settings.  Do not hit the screen.  Do not curse at the computer.  There is a dude in Payton's Precious Kindergarten!  I am Greg from Smedley's Smorgasboard of Kindergarten!  I am so happy that Mrs. Payton is allowing me rampage through her blog...

A little about me...then I will get onto the educational stuff!  I am a rockstar of sorts...a male kindergarten teacher!   I know we're rare...but we're out there!  I am a newlywed and a pretty sarcastic dude.  I also like to think I'm funny!  I teach at an inner city school with 16 kindergarteners who I affectionately call my little monsters!  I run a tight ship in my classroom but we also have a lot of fun! And we get MESSY!  My definition of a successful day in Kindergarten is when a parent is upset that we got paint all over us!  So that's me...and now some teachery stuff!

Kourtney asked me to talk about how I teach letters and sounds in my classroom....so here goes!

My goal for letters and sounds is that by the end of October all of my students will know all of their letters and sounds.  This year we're close to that goal but still have a few stragglers.  And that's fine because they will get there because of the near constant exposure to the letters and sounds.

Each week we "do not focus on a letter of the week" (see, there is my sarcasm!)  Long story!  If you want the details email me and I will share.  We celebrate a letter each week to introduce the sound and build a firm foundation for that sound.  During the week we do picture sorts (I am the KING OF PICTURE SORTS!), we do a silly hat on Monday, Tuesday we make a phonics watch courtesy of the Moffat Girls (we use their phonics hats and phonics watches!  SO CUTE!)
 and we do handwriting.  We even incorporate the letter writing into our Morning Meeting. As you can tell, we don't teach the letter and sound in isolation.  It is incorporated throughout the week.

Our district has adopted the Treasures reading series (I plead the fifth!) so we follow their letter order just because it was convenient to already have an order and it actually works very well.  We do not include their review week (which they have after every two week!) so we have time later in the year to do blends and R controlled sounds and long and short vowels!  Here is our letter order:

M  A  S  P  T  I  N  C  O  F  H  D/R  E  B/L  K  U  G/W  X/V  J/Q  Y/Z

I am most famous for my silly hat Mondays!  We make these great alphabet hats that I found at

Click HERE to see the Alphabet Hat pack that I use!

We make these on Monday as our "hook" for the letter we do not celebrate!  I make one as a model and wear it!  Then I post it all over the internet!  It's become a staple of teacher blog land I think!

See...

At the beginning of the year, I use a letter PowerPoint every morning as part of our morning routine.  This builds our letter naming fluency!   We do the letters in random order (upper and lowercase) every day until the end of October!  I also use this to play quick games of "Around The World!"  If you want this PowerPoint, just click on the picture to download!

I hope you find this information useful!

I would love for you to visit me on Facebook, Teachers Pay Teachers and Twitter!  And come visit my crazy fun blog!

Teachers Pay Teachers

And now for a little give away!  The FIRST THREE (3) people to leave a comment on this post and share a letter/sound activity will receive my beginning sounds picture sorts (Leave your email!)!!  There is a picture sort for every letter!  These the picture sorts I use on Monday as my pre-assessment to see how well we know our sound!