Beginning Sounds with Musical Instruments — Letter A

Begin with accordion and listen to its first sound. This sheet asks the child to find every one of the instruments that starts the same way as A — accordion — and mark them. The point is the sound at the front of each word and the letter A it belongs to, the Kindergarten letter-sound link, set in a scene mixing a drum, a bell and a flute so the child sifts many opening sounds to find A's.

Hearing the opening sound of a spoken word and tying it to a letter is exactly the letter-sound correspondence Kindergarten readers build. Marking the instruments that begin with A rehearses it many times: say accordion, listen to its start, match A. Because the child works from pictures and their own voice, no reading is needed — just the ear and the growing sense that A stands for one particular sound.

A child who hears that accordion opens with the A sound is doing real reading groundwork, one picture at a time. Keep going with the C-sound pictures in musical instruments, or the D-sound pictures in musical instruments. The full instruments 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.