After we write about what we can see out our window, I ask the “weather watcher” to tell us what the weather feels like. “What did the weather feel like outside when you were walking into school?” I emphasize the sense of touch to describe the weather in this sentence. I make sound associations in several ways including writing visual symbols that represent the particular phoneme in that word. I tell funny little snippet “stories” of letters as I write that tries to explain that this letter wants to sound like another letter or “behaves” differently around different letters or in different words, usually describing behavior that four and five year olds know quite well because letters are very much like children; they follow rules most of the time, but sometimes, they do not make the sound I taught them. Instead, they “feel” like doing something else like making another sound in certain situations. I will group “friendly” or “family” letters together that create one phonemic sound, “chunking” digraphs, vowel combinations, and dipthongs). Less