Christmas Tree CVC Word Building Mat

If there’s one thing I love about Christmas, it’s the tree! I love all Christmas trees from the lavish fir to the scrawny Charlie Brown trees. What a perfect way to celebrate the season AND better prepare your little tree decorators for early reading and writing. Help kids improve phonetic awareness with the cvc words lists and building mat. One of the best ways for children to explore the relationship between letters and sounds is with word building. This Christmas printable for kindergarteners is a wonderful, hands-on reading activity to really kick off your winter kindergarten literacy centers with a bang!

Your students will love the colorful, Christmas tree-themed pictures and they will gain valuable skills in short vowel sounds and consonants. Get the Christmas tree CVC Word Building Mat for Kindergarten today!

Teaching CVC Words in Kindergarten:

EARLY READING SKILLS

CONSONANT VOWEL CONSONANT PICTURE CARDS ARE IMPORTANT IN EARLY WORD BUILDING. THEY ALLOW KIDS TO CONNECT A VISUAL IMAGE WITH A WRITTEN WORD.

Blending individual sounds helps students create real (and pretend) words. This is a great first step towards reading!.

Building CVC words with letter tiles or other materials gives students an opportunity to use multiple senses and encourage hands-on learning. This is much more fun than just reading off a words list.

I would introduce this activity whole group and practice it together several times. Then it could be used as a center during guided reading. It’s okay to let them explore independently without checking for accuracy every single time. This can be done in small groups or individually.

I made sure to include a ton of CVC picture cards with different word families for students to read. For students that may need a bit of extra support, create smaller sets of word cards. This could include rhyming words, beginning consonants, words with the same vowels, and other spelling patterns.

In addition to practicing short vowels in this activity, students will improve phonological awareness by saying each word and stretching each sound to spell it.

Phonics for Kindergarteners

phonemic awareness skills

DECODING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CAN SOMETIMES SEEM IMPOSSIBLE TO EARLY READERS. KINDERGARTENERS WILL GAIN CONFIDENCE AND MOTIVATION WHEN THEY FEEL SUCCESSFUL WITH CVC WORD GAMES.

When kindergarten and 1st grade students break a word into individual sounds, then write the letter that represents each sound, it’s called phoneme (sounds)-grapheme (letters) mapping.

This Christmas tree CVC mat can help students with the following skills:

• Identify the picture and the CVC word’s meaning
• Stretch the word into individual sounds orally
• Identify which letter makes each sound

Why Is Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping Important?

Learning easy words to spell in kindergarten provides basic decoding practice, which will eventually lead to greater automaticity and fluency. Spelling lists with CVC words form a strong foundation for moving on to consonant blends, digraphs, long vowels, and more complex patterns.

Reading Skills Gained From Building Words

How To Use The Christmas Tree Word Building Activity

BUILDING WORDS WITH KINDERGARTENERS

All you need to do is print one word building mat for each student onto white card stock and laminate them.

Print, cut, and laminate the present picture cards.

Children will draw a card and name it.

Then, they can place it in the box at the top of the word building mat.

Next, you have two choices. If you want students to use manipulatives for each sound, they can slide a counter into the box while saying each sound in the word before matching the sounds to letters.

If you want them to spell the word with letters, they can say each sound and place the corresponding letters in the box.

Finally, students will copy the letters onto the lines at the bottom of the page.

Erase, repeat!

Other Ways To Use The Christmas Tree CVC Word Building Mat:

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