Beginning Sounds with Christmas — Letter O

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

Beginning-sound matching is phonics, not visual searching: the child is not looking for the shape of O on the page, they are listening for which Christmas things START with its sound and connecting that sound to the letter. With ornament to find, the practice stays concrete, and every picture named strengthens the link between the sound the child hears and the letter O it goes with.

A child who hears that ornament opens with the O 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.