Letter name and letter sound small groups are not only about teaching letters. Students also build other skills like oral language, turn taking, listening to peers, attention, and self-regulation. It’s also one of the best contexts for an educator to observe students. A student who knows their letters still gets a lot from the small-group lesson, so pulling them out based on their already demonstrated knowledge of letter names and letter sounds would be at the expense of building these skills.
It’s also important to think about what “knows most letters” really means. Knowing letter names, knowing sounds, matching capitals to lowercase, and forming letters are all separate skills. Students might be strong in one of those skills but not so strong in another. Observing them in the small group and completing the Group Observation Notes and Skills Check will show what they actually know.
For children who are really strong in all those skills, the goal would be to enrich horizontally, not vertically. Instead of moving them ahead to kindergarten content, such as reading words or a separate “advanced” sequence, we want to make the same lesson richer for them. For example, the educator might try:
- Asking them to find the letter in classmates’ names, signs, or book covers around the room
- Having them come up with more words with that sound, including silly or made-up ones
- Asking them to describe the shape and compare it (“How is b like d? How is it different?”)
- Building vocabulary with the picture words: “Tell me more about a walrus”
- For ML students, connect to home language: “Does that sound happen in Spanish too? What word?”
While acceleration might feel responsive, it is often done at the expense of depth. It also tends to sort preschoolers into “fast” and “slow” groups early, and those labels stick. Enrichment keeps everyone in the same community of learners while still giving each child real challenge.