Beginning Sounds with Christmas — Letter C

Begin with candle and listen to its first sound. This sheet asks the child to find every one of the Christmas things that starts the same way as C — candle, church and candy cane — and mark them. The point is the sound at the front of each word and the letter C it belongs to, the Kindergarten letter-sound link, set in a scene mixing a tree, a bauble and a stocking so the child sifts many opening sounds to find C's.

Matching a sound to its letter is what eventually lets a child decode words, and it starts with beginning sounds like C's. This sheet has the child hear the opening of each picture — candle and the rest of the Christmas things — and connect it to C. A scene of a tree, a bauble and a stocking offers many first sounds, so the sound-letter link gets rehearsed across a rich mix of words rather than drilled one at a time.

A child who hears that candle opens with the C sound is doing real reading groundwork, one picture at a time. Keep going with the A-sound pictures in christmas, or the B-sound pictures in christmas. The full Christmas things 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.