Free Fall Themed Activities for Emergent Readers

I have been working extra hard in these first few days after the season change to bring you some free fall-themed activities for emergent readers! Summer is over, and I’m sad. I’m drowning my sorrows in creating cool activities to help make planning small reading groups easier. I wrote about managing small groups in this article. It’s important to have fun independent work while you help other kids. It’s also critical for you to have engaging instructional materials to instruct your differentiated groups. These science of reading activities will help you teach letters, sounds and decoding. Check them out!

Alphabet Review Free Fall Themed Activities for Emergent Readers

Teaching letters and sounds can be tricky. Students need lots of opportunities to practice so they can remember each letter and its corresponding sound. These free activities will make learning letters fun for your kids.

Digital and PDF Letter Review Activities

As a reading interventionist during Covid-19, I was looking for a way to quickly complement my virtual and in-person instruction in letter recognition and letter sounds. These digital letter and sound sort activities have helped my students so much! I can assign these to a virtual classroom, or I can project them on my screen and have the kids come up and tell me what needs to move. I have done both with success! These digital free fall themed activities for emergent readers are short, engaging, and I found them to be effective as well!

PDF Activities

In addition to the digital activities, I needed some quick, manipulative practice to engage my little learners as they tried to master their letters and sounds. I made these letter sound and letter recognition printables to use in my classroom. These are great for independent practice while you teach small groups.

How to Use the Product in Your Groups

I cut and laminated the letter cards so students could match the upper- and lowercase letters. I made six copies and stored them in baggies. I’ve been using these for several years now! I did the same with the sound sort. The student sheets proved helpful when I needed to provide homework or activities for volunteers to do with students.

This free activity is a part of my big alphabet bundle that includes instructional activities for all the letters in this order: T, B, F, M, N, I, U, C, O, A, G, D, S, E, R, P, J, L, H, K, V, W, Y, X, Qu, Z.

Included, you will find the following:

• • Digital letter recognition sort
• • Digital letter sound sort
• • PDF letter recognition sorts
• • PDF letter sound sort
• • PDF cut and paste letter recognition activities
• • PDF cut and paste letter sound activity

Alphabet Letter Sound Memory Game

Alphabet matching games are a fun way for our emergent readers to improve or review letter and sound recognition! Again, when I taught virtual intervention groups during Covid-19, I needed fun games to play during digital meetings with kids. These letter and sound matching activities really helped. Bonus, these two are free!

The big bundle containing these activities has PDF and Digital Matching Games for all the letters!

Ideas for Using the Digital Games

I made a copy of my digital game before each lesson so I wouldn’t mess it up. I then shared the game on my screen with my virtual students. They would tell me what square to move, and I would delete them. If they had a match, I would award that student a point. If not, I would go on to the next student. Students had to tell me what square to move by describing the graphic in complete sentences. For this freebie, they could say, “Move the orange pumpkin.”

With in-person small groups, I projected the digital games and had students come up and tell me which squares to move. They had to use complete sentences to describe the picture. These games are excellent working memory exercises!

Ideas for Using the PDF Games

After working with Kindergarteners and first graders for the first time as a reading interventionist, I soon realized I only had a short time to get concepts across to students. I needed some quick, manipulative activities to engage my little learners as they tried to master their letters and sounds. For this reason, I made these printable PDF games to use in my classroom groups.

I cut and laminated the squares so students could match the upper and lowercase letters and the corresponding pictures. Then, I drew different colored shapes on the back. Now, I play the game together with a small group of two students, or I give each child their own set. When we finish our group, they can take the set home. These free fall themed activities for emergent readers are so much fun!

Fall-Themed Decodable Readers

These two FREE fall-themed decodable texts have been so much fun for my students to use. As kids develop their phonics skills, it is essential to have plenty of different types of decodable readers for them to use for practice.

These little books are easy to use and will give your reading groups meaning and connection to the season.

These texts are foldable, so all you have to do is run a copy of each page, fold it into fourths, and you have a book. It’s so much easier than trying to figure out which page goes in the copier in which direction. Just print, fold, and go!

This free set of decodable texts includes 2 foldable texts. Each skill is clearly designated at the top so you can organize your copies.

The following skills are included in this set:

• Mixed CVC
• Digraphs

These free fall themed activities for emergent readers are included in a bundle with all my fall-themed differentiated foldable decodable readers and decodable poems.

The following skills are addressed in this big bundle:

• Mixed CVC
• Digraphs
• Blends
• vCe
• Syllable Division Rules
• Vowel Teams

Fall-Themed CVC Sound Boxes

Need some FREE sound boxes (Elkonin boxes) for your science of reading curriculum? Emergent readers will love these fall-themed CVC sound boxes! These differentiated cards will help your early readers with phonological awareness or orthographic mapping, depending on how you choose to use them.

There are two sets of sound box task cards with twelve CVC word cards in each. One set has all the letters provided for each word. Students can tap each letter, make its sound, and blend the sounds to make the word. Each part of this activity is scaffolded for them. The final set has only blank boxes.

I printed, laminated, and cut these cards out. I have students tap the boxes to make the sound or slide a colored token in each box as they say each sound. These activities that focus on sounds will help develop phonemic awareness. To practice orthographic mapping, students can also write the letters in the appropriate box with a dry erase marker.

These freebies are part of my Fall-Themed Sound Box Bundle. This includes sound boxes for CVC words, digraphs, beginning blends, and end blends and digraphs.

Final Thoughts:

I really hope these free fall themed activities for emergent readers help streamline your small group planning for a bit. If these work for you, consider checking out the bundles they’re in. That will keep on your smooth planning trajectory for the entire fall season. I love positive reviews in my store, as well, way more than I like pumpkin spice lattes. If you do download a freebie or two, I’d love it if you would leave me a positive review for them. That would help me out greatly. Thanks for stopping by, and happy teaching!