Beginning Sounds with Insects and Bugs — Letter M

On this worksheet a child sorts bugs by their first sound. Given the letter M, they find mosquito and millipede — the pictures that begin with the sound M stands for — among a scene of an ant, a bee and a ladybug. They say mosquito out loud, hear where it starts, and connect that sound to M. This is beginning-sound matching, the Kindergarten skill of linking a sound to its letter, not a search for the letter's shape.

Producing the match — deciding that mosquito begins with M — asks a child to do real phonics: hold the sound M makes in mind and test each picture's opening against it. Because the bugs include names that begin other ways, the child cannot guess; they have to listen. That careful sound-by-sound checking against the letter M is precisely what Kindergarten reading is built on.

A child who hears that mosquito opens with the M sound is doing real reading groundwork, one picture at a time. Keep going with the A-sound pictures in insects and bugs, or the B-sound pictures in insects and bugs. The full bugs 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.