3.2 Explicitly Teaching Letter Names and Sounds

Introducing the Letter ‘Bb’

This lesson plan includes warm-up phonemic awareness activities and all the steps needed to introduce a new letter. A good resource for kindergarten teachers or anyone working on new sounds with early readers.

Teacher Tip: Uppercase or Lowercase?

When students are first learning the letters of the alphabet, we teach the upper and lowercase letters at the same time. In addition, when we teach students to write the letter, we teach them how to form the upper and lowercase letter. Once a letter has been explicitly taught and students have had multiple opportunities to practice naming and writing both the upper and lowercase letters, we shift our focus to representing sounds and words with only lowercase letters. That’s because we read and write lowercase letters much more often than we do uppercase letters.