What I found interesting in the IRA's position statement was about the role phonemic awareness plays in a child's ability to read. Before this article I had no clue that phonics and phonemic awareness were different things, I just assumed they were one in the same. The IRA's statement draws the conclusion that while phonemic awareness is crucial to learning how to read it maybe or may not need to come before a child starts to learn to read or before they even have a simple over view of letters... I have to say I partially agree with this because I don't know how we can explain to a child that "s" and "h" make a "shhhhh" sounds if they do not even understand what the "s" and "h" are. But I have no doubt that some kind of phonemic awareness needs to be taught because it can help bring more value to the concept of reading by helping kids understand how words are made up (and what the different units of words are like syllables) and the sounds letters make, rather then just have kids memorize words. This website had some good examples of some phonemic awareness activities to do with students.
After reading this article and doing a little research to find some ways to teach phonemic awareness and I was surprised to see that rhymes are a great way to teach phonemic awareness! Rhymes like "Jack and Jill" and "Humpty Dumpty" are just a few! All photos found through Google Images
Rhyming is a fabulous way to promote phonemic awareness. I always loved playing rhyming games with my young kids. You can always just have kids come up with as many words as they can that rhyme with "cat" or "car". There are also more advanced rhyming games like "hink pinks". Google search hink pinks or hinky pinky and you will find some fun things.
ReplyDeleteTo build on Monica's comment, I remember playing rhyming games with my parents all the time as a young child. I also liked coming up with new rhyming words of my own such as cat, dat, tat, lat, etc. Coming up with my own rhyming words felt silly and fun, while at the same time, I was also practicing my phonemic awareness skills!
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this because I actually used rhyming this weekend with the kids i babysit. We read the Cat in the Hat Comes Back by Dr.Seuss. I let the 7r old hold the book and read to his 5 yr old sister and me. On some words he had a hard time sounding them out. I would place my finger over the part of the word and have him sound it out. I would then refer back to the word it rhymed with and tell him it sounds like this word. I also would slow down on certain parts and have both of the kids read with me. It made bed time reading WAY more enjoyable and they were so exhausted by the end of the book from using their own minds to read that they fell right to sleep!
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