After reading each of the articles that were shared in class this week, I found myself able to relate most to the articles discussing phonological awareness. While phonological awareness is the ability to make and recognize rhyming words, count syllables and separate the beginning of a word from its ending, phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that the speech stream consists of a sequence of sounds. Specifically, phonemic awareness instruction consists of concentration on units of sounds, tasks or operations, and use of cues. The article goes on to suggest kinds of activities that can be used to help the development of phonemic awareness in young children. Being a kindergarten teacher myself, it was very interesting to read about the different strategies and skills that I should be incorporating into my lessons. It was also reassuring to see that I already include some of the ideas in my reading groups.
In kindergarten, most students are not ready for reading instruction at the beginning of the year. Therefore, much of my time in the first half of the year is spent strengthening phonemic awareness skills in my students. I play many games with them to practice blending and segmenting words, and the students participate in silly poems and songs that focus on rhyming words during whole group lessons. We look at word families and have fun changing the words by simply changing the first letter. Segmenting and blending words is a skill that children should master in kindergarten. The following is a little song that I like to use with my class to practice phonemic segmentation:
Listen, listen to my word,
Then tell me all the sounds you heard: race
/r/ is one sound
/a/ is two,
/s/ is last in race it's true.
Thanks for listening to my word
And telling all the sounds you heard!
The kids love when it is their turn to choose a word for us to segment. They also love a game we play where we pretend to put a big piece of bubble gum in our mouths, chew it up really well, and then use our fingers to stretch the gum from our mouths as we listen for each sound in a given word. Some students used this technique during writers' workshop. It was so cute to see them use their "gum" to hear the sounds in the word they were trying to write. My point is, no matter what activities you do, if you teach pre-K, Kindergarten or first grade, you need to find a way to incorporate phonemic awareness activities into your daily routine. Until a student can segment and blend sounds of a word together, he/she will have a difficult time when faced with an unknown word.
I think your idea of using gum to help students stretch their sounds is great! I have tried that idea using rubber bands, but I think that the gum would be much more successful. It would allow the children to think about the word as they chew the gum, and then stretch the word with something they helped "create." I bet they love the opportunity to chew gum in school as well!
ReplyDeleteThe rhyme that you shared was a great idea! I have been thinking about how to incorporate more phonemic awareness activities in my class for next year. That rhyme is a simple and effective way to have some daily phonemic awareness practice without the hassle of planning an original lesson for each new day. My plan for next year is to do something exactly like this every day. I want to have some activity or game that the students will enjoy for a few minutes before the whole group lesson begins. This way the class is doing phonemic awareness activities on a consistent basis, without realizing they are doing "work." Thank you for the wonderful idea!