Spotlight on Fundations

Echo the Owl helps us practice our letters and sounds! 

You may have heard your child mention a part of our day called Fundations. Fundations is our word study time, or phonics instruction. Phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds and is the basis to learning to read and spell. We do Fundations each day for twenty minutes in our classroom. During this time, students engage in a number of systematic activities designed to practice and understand what sounds the letters in our alphabet make. The video below shows students as we complete the warm up portion of the lesson, in which we practice all of the letters and sounds taught up to that point.  

The vowel extension chart, which highlights the sounds the vowels make. 

A student leads the class using the vowel extension chart. 

During Fundations, we practice matching letters to the sounds they make. The photo below shows our magnetic letter board. We use these during an activity called "Echo Find Letters." To do this activity, I say a letter sound and students must locate the letter that makes that sound. We also will use this board to practice putting the letters in alphabetical order later in the year.

The video below shows an activity called "Echo Letter Formation." During this time, we practice correctly writing the letters. We use special dry erase boards that have the Fundations lines (sky line, plane line, grass line and worm line) on them. Students practice "Skywriting" letters and tracing the letters in their Student Notebooks early in the week and later in the week use the boards and markers to write the letters.

Additional activities that we do in Fundations include "Word Play" during which we become more aware of words and how words form sentences. We discuss capitalizing sentences and ending punctuation. We also have "Storytime," which is a time for listening and reading comprehension,

Fundations is a time for students to practice important skills, which they then apply throughout their day to their reading and writing. Ask your child about some of the letters we've learned so far!