Beginning Sounds with Body Parts — Letter E

Begin with eye and listen to its first sound. This sheet asks the child to find every one of the body parts that starts the same way as E — eye, ear and eyelashes — and mark them. The point is the sound at the front of each word and the letter E it belongs to, the Kindergarten letter-sound link, set in a scene mixing a hand, a foot and an ear so the child sifts many opening sounds to find E's.

Producing the match — deciding that eye begins with E — asks a child to do real phonics: hold the sound E makes in mind and test each picture's opening against it. Because the body parts include names that begin other ways, the child cannot guess; they have to listen. That careful sound-by-sound checking against the letter E is precisely what Kindergarten reading is built on.

A child who hears that eye opens with the E sound is doing real reading groundwork, one picture at a time. Keep going with the A-sound pictures in body parts, or the B-sound pictures in body parts. The full body parts 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.