Beginning Sounds with Desserts and Sweets — Letter I

On this worksheet a child sorts sweet treats by their first sound. Given the letter I, they find ice cream — the pictures that begin with the sound I stands for — among a scene of a cupcake, a lollipop and a pie. They say ice cream out loud, hear where it starts, and connect that sound to I. This is beginning-sound matching, the Kindergarten skill of linking a sound to its letter, not a search for the letter's shape.

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

A child who hears that ice cream opens with the I sound is doing real reading groundwork, one picture at a time. Keep going with the C-sound pictures in desserts and sweets, or the D-sound pictures in desserts and sweets. The full sweet treats 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.