Use Movement to Teach Reading

There are so many different learning styles. It is critical that we as teachers strive to target as many different learning types as we can. When it comes to teaching decoding and reading skills, we often don’t reach our kinesthetic learners. Today, I have some ways for you to incorporate movement into your kindergarten reading class! These teacher tips will get even your wiggliest students reading and growing.

Chop It!

As students are decoding CVC words, have them karate chop with each sound they hear! So, if the word is ‘cat’, students can make karate chop movements as they say the sounds ‘c’, ‘a’, and ‘t’. Then, when it’s time to blend the sounds together, they can make another fun karate move to read the word!

Step & Slide

Another way to move through the sounds of a word is to get your students up and stomping! For each sound a student hears, he or she can stomp it out. Then, he slides the feet together as he blends the word. This builds on phonemic awareness skills, because students may only stomp for each sound they hear when saying a word…not necessarily how many letters there are. For example, ‘ship’ only gets three stomps, even though it has four letters!

Roller Coaster Sounds

Roller Coaster blending is another fun way to get students moving while reading! Students slide their hands along their arms, saying each sound they hear. Then, when they are ready to blend and read, they can slide their hand again faster…as if their arm is a roller coaster!

Movement in Reading Resources

If you’re ready to start using movement in reading right away, I have some resources that will help you get started! Chop and Write is a fun literacy activity that gets students chopping out sounds for words, then writing the words down. Additionally, my ‘Digital Day in K’ resource has several CVC reading and writing tasks that you can work movement into! You can get both resources bundled at a discount HERE. And, check out this blog post to get more CVC reading tips!