If you are a kindergarten teacher or a parent of a kindergartner, you know you need to teach your kids how to read and write CVC words. If you are asking yourself, “what is a CVC word?” or “how do I teach CVC words?” then this post is for you! I am going to share what CVC words are, how to teach them, and fun activities your students can use in the classroom to practice reading and writing CVC words.

A CVC word is comprised of a consonant, vowel, and consonant sound. When a vowel is followed by a consonant, it is a closed syllable and makes the vowel say its sound. Cat is an example of a CVC word. Each letter makes its sound and is therefore decodable and easy for a beginning reader to sound out. Dog, big, pot, sun, and bag are also examples of CVC words.

WHY DO WE TEACH CVC WORDS?

Since CVC words are easily decodable, they help our beginning readers feel successful when learning how to read. Once your students master reading CVC words, they can start learning to read other phonics skills including magic e words (long vowel words), and words that have blends & digraphs (two consonants next to each other in a word).

At the start of the school year, I teach my kindergartners how to read CVC words without using any letters! We work on our phonemic awareness first so that we understand that a word is made up of letter sounds. I like to use these CVC sound boxes to help my student learn the sounds in each word.

First, we say the word and count the boxes to see how many sounds are in the word. Then, we say each sound on its own and push a chip up as we say it. For the word cat, we say /c/, /a/, /t/ and push up 3 chips. After we push up all the sounds, we practice saying the word “just like we talk”. I like to have my students slide their finger under the word or push a toy car along the arrow when saying the word.