*READ TO THE END FOR THIS WEEK'S LITERACY TIP OF THE WEEK!* Hey First name / There! Over the last few weeks, we've learned all about how to prepare our preschoolers to read through PLAY: |
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P: Phonological & Phonemic Awareness L: (Oral) Language A: Alphabetic Principle & Print Knowledge Y: Yet…the Magic Word! |
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Each email gave a brief overview of that topic, but there's SO much more to learn! For the next few weeks, we're going to dive deep into the first P: Phonological & Phonemic Awareness. For the next month, we're going to cover each level of the Phonological Awareness Continuum, as described by David Kilpatrick in his book Equipped for Reading Success. Those levels are: - Word Awareness
- Syllables
- Onset-Rime
- Phoneme*
- Phoneme Manipulation*
- *These two are part of phonemic awareness, which is a subset of phonological awareness.
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Today's topic is Word Awareness. |
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Word Awareness is the understanding that a phrase or sentence is made up of individual words. It’s also the ability to manipulate words in phrases or sentences. (This includes playing with compound words.) Word awareness is the most basic level of phonological awareness and seems incredibly simple to us adults. We can easily hear three separate and distinct words in the sentence, “The dog walks.” It might take us a moment to count, but we can also hear fourteen separate and distinct words in the sentence, “Can you please stop at the store for more milk on your way home?” But this is not easy for our little ones, especially our youngest preschoolers. |
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Here are a few multisensory games you can play with your students to develop their word awareness skills. All of these are done orally. SENTENCE SEGMENTATION: All of these activities will help your preschoolers understand that sentences are made up of words. These games involve you saying an oral sentence to your students...the sillier, the better! You’ll also want your students to repeat each sentence back to you to work on their memory skills and count the number of words they heard (if they’re ready for this): MOVE IT: - Say a silly sentence, such as, “The cat eats cookies,” and have your students do an action for each word (such as squats, lunges, jumping jacks, or elbow-to-knees).
SMASH IT: - Have your students roll out multiple balls of play dough. You say a silly sentence, such as, “The duck plays soccer,” and your students will line up the play dough balls in a row for each word they hear (from left to right). Then they will repeat the sentence, smashing one play dough ball for each word.
BUILD IT: - Say a silly sentence, such as, “The donut makes spaghetti,” and have your students build a tower out of blocks, one block for each word. They could also use legos, magnatiles, or unifix cubes to build.
HOPSCOTCH IT: - Draw a hopscotch board outside with sidewalk chalk. You say a silly sentence, such as “Billy Bat went ice skating,” and have your students jump on the hopscotch board while repeating the sentence, one jump for each word.
TAP IT: - Have your students hold out their left arm straight in front of them. Say a silly sentence, such as, “The kangaroo reads,” and have them tap down their arm with their right hand. They would tap at their shoulder for “The,” at their elbow for “kangaroo,” and at their wrist for, “reads.”
HEAD SHOULDER KNEES TOES: - Say a silly sentence, such as, “The dragon breathes ice,” and have your students touch their head, shoulders, knees, and toes for each word.
HUMAN SENTENCE: - Say a silly sentence, and have one student line up for each word they heard. Then have the group repeat the sentence together.
WORD MANIPULATION: The goal of these activities is to mix up words within sentences or replace one word with another, and then have your preschoolers listen for the changes. NURSERY RHYME MIX UP: - Tell your students you’re going to sing a favorite nursery rhyme, but you’re going to change one of the words. Their job is to tell you which word you changed.
- For example, if you sing, “Humpty Dumpty,” you could change it to, “All the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men.” Then they would tell you that you changed “king” to “queen.”
SONG SWAP: - Change a favorite song to include different words. This is fun to do based on the theme you’re learning about or just based on what interests your class.
- For example, if your class loves, “The Wheels on the Bus,” and you’re doing a farm unit, you can change it to something silly like, “The cow on the bus says moooo moooo moooo.”
- Or if your class loves, “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” and you’re doing an emotions theme, you could change it to, “If you’re mad and you know it, stomp your feet.”
COMPOUND WORDS: - And of course, don’t forget about compound words! Give your students two words, such as “butter” and “fly” and ask them what word they can make.
- You can also give them one word like “foot” and ask them if they can think of another word they can add to “foot” to make a compound word (like “football.”)
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This week's literacy tip is one that I'm still working on myself, but I promise it makes a HUGE difference! When talking to your class about letter sounds, don't say that “letters make sounds.” Letters actually don't make sounds. Letters represent sounds. - C doesn't say /k/. C represents the speech sound /k/.
- We spell the /k/ sound with a letter C like in "caterpillar" so that others can read our writing.
I know this seems like a silly distinction, but it's SO SO powerful. When kids think letters make sounds, they think they can ONLY make that sound. It becomes VERY confusing to them when they learn that letters “make” different sounds, such as C representing /k/ or /s/ depending on the word. But if we use the correct language and say that letters represent sounds (or letters spell sounds), it makes it much easier for them to grasp the concept that sounds can be spelled in different ways. For example: - The /k/ sound can be spelled with a C, K, CK, CH, or Q(U)
- The /s/ sound can be spelled with a C, S, SS, SC, or PS
This philosophy of teaching reading is called speech to print, and it's the foundation of the Science of Reading. So my advice is to START with the speech sound and talk about how we spell that speech sound with printed letters. |
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I hope this email gave you LOTS of ideas for working on word awareness with your kiddos! It’s so important to make sure that each level of the phonological awareness continuum is being worked on before rushing to the next level. So take some time this week to see how your class is doing with their Word Awareness skills. See you next week for the next level: SYLLABLES. |
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P.S. Looking for all of our freebies?! Here's the info you need: Password: Lovetoread123 P.P.S. March is here and that means it's time to break out all your SPRING activities! Need some new ones? Head to the blog for lots of great ideas! |
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