Letters and stories
In Kindergarten, reading starts with the ear, not the eye. Before a child can read cat, they have to hear that it is three sounds. This is the area the new Alberta curriculum changed most.
What Alberta asks for by the end of Kindergarten
The subject: English language arts and literature
- Listen and speak: share ideas, stories and poems out loud.
- Recognize and print some letters and some words.
- Talk about people, places and things — real ones and made-up ones.
- Express ideas creatively, in words and in pictures.
- Join a conversation: ask questions, and speak in whole sentences.
- Copy words, to get used to how they are spelled.
Alberta's new curriculum puts a strong, explicit focus on phonological awareness from Kindergarten through Grade 2, and on phonics — letter-to-sound relationships — from Kindergarten through Grade 3. That is a real change from the 2000 program, where both were handled loosely.
The words, first
These are the terms a teacher will use at a parent interview, defined before anything below uses them.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Phonological awareness | Hearing that speech is made of parts. Clapping the beats in but‑ter‑fly, noticing that cat and hat rhyme. Nothing is written down — this is done with the ears. |
| Phoneme | One single sound. Ship has four letters but three phonemes: /sh/ /i/ /p/. |
| Phonemic awareness | The hardest kind of phonological awareness: hearing the separate phonemes. It is the single best predictor of how easily a child learns to read. |
| Phonics | Which letters make which sounds. This is where writing finally comes in: the sound /m/ is written m. |
| Letter name vs letter sound | B is named “bee” but makes the sound /b/. Both matter, and they are not the same thing — a child sounding out bat as “bee‑ay‑tee” has the names and not the sounds. |
| Concepts of print | Knowing how a book works at all: the front is the front, English runs left to right and top to bottom, the spaces mark where words end. |
ship
The word
sh · i · p
Three sounds
s h i p
Four letters
What to do at home
- Say it in pieces — At the door: “Get your c‑oa‑t.” Let them put the sounds back together. This is blending, and it is exactly what reading a word is.
- Rhyme in the car — Cat, hat, mat, splat. Silly words count — the point is hearing the ending, not knowing the word.
- First-sound hunts — “I spy something that starts with /s/.” Use the sound, not the letter name.
- Their own name first — A child's name is the word they care most about, so it is the easiest place to notice that letters are separate things in a fixed order.
- Read the same book again — The fifth reading is where a child starts predicting the next line, pointing at words, and noticing the print. Rereading is not wasted.
- Answer in a sentence — “Pizza” becomes “I want pizza for dinner.” The curriculum asks for complete ideas spoken aloud, and this is how that gets practised.
Sheets you can print for this
- Trace the big letters — a to z, upper case
- Trace the small letters — a to z, lower case
- Big letter, small letter — match the pairs
- What sound does it start with? — twelve pictures
- My name — write it, then write it again
The expectations above are paraphrased from Alberta Education's New K–6 curriculum fact sheets, which publish a snapshot of each grade rather than the complete program of studies. Alberta's full programs are at alberta.ca/curriculum.