Insect pocket chart sentences

Today I’m sharing a fun activity that teaches a variety of early reading skills!

Looking for a fantastic, fun way to build pre-reading skills?

Pocket chart sentences to the rescue!

You can use them to teach

• left to right directionality
• the concept of word
• capitalization and punctuation

How can you teach all that with one simple printable? Here’s how it works!

First, grab your supplies. You’ll need:

• Printed pocket chart sentences (get them in the free download at the end of this post)
• Pocket chart (we like this one)
• A pointer – such as plain wooden dowel or our favorite hand pointers

Next, cut apart the pocket chart sentences and place them on a large surface.

Show your learner(s) the sentence pattern you’re going to build. I showed my Four that we were going to make a group of sentences that follow this pattern:

“A ____ is an insect.”

She only knows a couple of words, but she knows all her letters and many of her sounds. With that in mind, I prompted her like this:

Let’s make a sentence. Which insect do you want to use in our sentence? A bee? Great!

Okay, let’s make the sentence, “A bee is an insect.” Can you find the word “a”? That’s right. Let’s put it at the beginning.

Now we need the word bee. Perfect. “A bee is …” We need to find the word is. Do you know which word says is? Let me help. We need a little word that starts with the /i/ sound. The letter i says /i/. Now can you find the word?

So we have “A bee is …” Now we need the word an. It’s a little word that starts with a. You found it!

One last word … insect.  What sound do you hear at the beginning of insect? /i/, /i/, insect. We need another word that starts with i. There! Our whole sentence! “A bee is an insect.” Let me see you point to each word as you read it back to me.

*Note: When you see a letter in italics, like this – i – I’m referring to the letter name.When you see a letter in brackets, like this – /i/ – I’m referring to its sound.

After we built the first sentence on the table, we put it on the pocket chart. She “read” it back to me using her pointer.

(Yes, I am fully aware that she wasn’t truly reading. She would need to recognize the words in isolation to be able to do that, and we haven’t started phonics instruction. yet. But our goal here was to advance pre-reading skills.)

We built more sentences right on the pocket chart. I helped her remember to leave spaces between each word.

When we finished, she had a lot of sentences to recite! Bonus – we also built her vocabulary. She had never heard of a silverfish or walking stick.

Have fun!

Get your free pocket chart sentences!

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Free Reading Printables for Pre-K-3rd Grade

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