Beginning Sounds with Christmas — Letter B

Say it, hear the start, match the letter B. The child looks over the Christmas things on this sheet and circles each one that begins with B's sound — bell. Because bell opens with that sound, it gets marked; pictures that begin another way do not. Catching the first sound of a spoken word and tying it to a letter is the heart of Kindergarten phonics, practised here across a scene of a tree, a bauble and a stocking.

To find what begins with B, a child must say each picture and isolate its first sound, then judge whether it matches B. That is the heart of early phonics — knowing the sound a letter makes and catching it at the front of words like bell. The varied a tree, a bauble and a stocking keep a wide set of opening sounds in play, so the work never narrows to one rehearsed answer; the child really has to listen.

Once a child can pick the B sound out of a word like bell, that same careful listening works everywhere. When this sheet feels easy, move on to the A-sound pictures in christmas, or the C-sound pictures in christmas. Every beginning-sounds worksheet and the full Christmas things set are free to print or play online for kindergarten, and each first sound a child names makes the next letter that little bit quicker to catch.