Beginning Sounds with Christmas — Letter E

Say it, hear the start, match the letter E. The child looks over the Christmas things on this sheet and circles each one that begins with E's sound — elf. Because elf 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.

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

Hunting a scene of Christmas things for the letter E is the kind of quiet phonics that adds up fast. After E, keep the listening going with the A-sound pictures in christmas, or the B-sound pictures in christmas. The whole Christmas things collection and every beginning-sounds sheet print cleanly or play free online for kindergarten — and the more opening sounds a child sorts, the more automatic the sound-to-letter link becomes.