Beginning Sounds with Animals — Letter A

Begin with antelope and listen to its first sound. This sheet asks the child to find every one of the animals that starts the same way as A — antelope — and mark them. The point is the sound at the front of each word and the letter A it belongs to, the Kindergarten letter-sound link, set in a scene mixing a cat, a sheep and a hen so the child sifts many opening sounds to find A's.

Linking the letter A to the sound it makes is the bedrock of Kindergarten reading, and this hunt practises it directly: the child hears the first sound of antelope and decides it belongs to A. This is letter-SOUND work, not letter-shape recognition — a child has to know what A sounds like, then catch that sound at the start of words like antelope, long before they could read those words on their own.

A child who hears that antelope opens with the A sound is doing real reading groundwork, one picture at a time. Keep going with the B-sound pictures in animals, or the C-sound pictures in animals. The full animals collection and every beginning-sounds worksheet are free to print or play online for kindergarten, and every first sound a child catches builds toward sounding out whole words later.