Teaching Tuesday: Phonemic Awareness Phun

I judge all reading curricula, reading teachers, reading tutors and reading programs by their treatment of phonemic awareness. When I first started teaching in my old district, there was nothing in any of the suggested reading resources that included phonemic awareness. Many of the teachers hadn't learned about it in their education programs, either. Luckily, my "vast" experience (I was the most experienced first grade teacher that year - and all four of us were new to the district) of long term subbing north of Seattle had taught me all about it.

I swear it was the only reason any of our students learned to read that year at all, what with there being no actual reading curriculum or anything.  Things have improved there in the last 15 years, but I still feel that there's not enough emphasis on phonemic awareness. Later on, I used to have fifth graders come to my reading group because, while they could sort of read, they couldn't sound out multi-syllabic words. You know why? Because if you said, " /b/ /a/ /th/ /t/ /i/ /m/ "to them, they wouldn't realize you'd said, "Bathtime."

Regardless of your district's or homeschool curriculum's attitude, you don't have to let that happen to your child. Phonemic awareness games can be semi-fun and need only take 5 or 10 minutes a day. You can play them in the car or at the dinner table or right before you read to your kiddo.

Rhyming:

• Rhyme Time: say 2 words, have your kiddo give a thumbs up or a thumbs down if they rhymed. 
• I Spy: instead of using a color as a clue, say, "I spy with my little eye something that rhymes with ____". 
• Find a Rhyme: say a three sounds word, such as cat or pig, and let your child come up with a rhyme for it. Don't worry if it's not an actual word, just worry about the rhyme. If your child can't, focus on playing the two games above for a while longer. 

Syllables:

• Guess the Word: say a two syllable word, but with the pause between the syllables. Such as, "/play/ /ground/". Then see if your child can guess the word. Work from compound words like playground to regular two syllable words like later to three syllable words like broccoli. 
• Clap It Out: Clap out the number of syllables in names and common words. For example, Triplezmom 4 claps, so it has 4 syllables. 

Blending:

• Make a Word: Instead of separating syllables in words, now you are going to separate the sounds. Try saying /a/, then saying /t/. Hopefully, your kiddo will be able to blend those sounds together to say the word "at". If not, try saying each sound without pausing and see if your kid can hear the new word then. Start with two sound words like at, ate, it, to, my, by, in, on, up and move on to three sound words like pig, mop and dime. 

Somewhere around 3 or 4, your preschooler is ready to learn about rhyming. I would not move on to the syllables or blending until your little one is much closer to kindergarten, though. The last thing you want is for your child to dread phonemic awareness games because they're too hard. And if your older child is struggling with reading, ask his/her teacher about phonemic awareness, find a tutor who's familiar with it or try these games. 

Teaching Tuesday: Rhyming, Yo

Before I had kids, I used to talk to my mom about my students, as they were the closest thing I had to kids. Once when I was talking about my struggling reader group and I explained that one poor fifth grader was having such a rough time because he had no phonological awareness skills.

"What are phonological awareness skills?" asked my editor/writer/reading at 4 years old mother.

Which was funny because not only because of my own mother's reading skills, but because she and my dad had read me nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss and had entertained me with "The Rhyming Game" (like I Spy, but with rhyming words as clues) throughout my early childhood. Basically, they were the ideal phonological awareness parents, even though they never called it that.

Phonological awareness is the understanding of and the ability to manipulate sounds in language, basically. That sentences are made of words, that words are made of syllables, that words can rhyme, that syllables are made of phonemes and that phonemes can be isolated, deleted and substituted. For example, the word "cat" has 3 sounds; /c/ /a/ and /t/. I've just isolated the sounds in "cat". If I delete the first sound, you've got "at". If I substitute the last sound, you could have "cap" or "cad".

Kids who struggle with the sounds of language have a hard time decoding words; if you can't hear that the sounds /p/ /i/ /n/ say "pin", then you're not going to be able to read/sound out/decode the word later on. The easiest way to teach your kid about phonological awareness is to read books that incorporate rhyme and/or play with language. Obviously, Dr. Seuss is the master, but you can try these as well:





As you read these books for the 120th time, start asking your kid to fill in some of the rhyming words in the text. Trust me, once your kids can rhyme the other phonological awareness skills will come along easily (and you can let their teachers do most of the work on those).

But let's say that your child is obsessed with the solar system and wants to read space books every night. This happened to us for about a month when my older kids were in preschool. I was terribly worried that they'd miss out on rhyming and subsequent phonological awareness skills. And that this would make them have trouble reading later on. So I started speaking in rhymes.

Not all the time, I am so not that clever. But every time that I had to repeat directions? I threw in a rhyme. "Please put on your shoes! Please put on your shoes-blues! Shoes-blues!" I tried to use a different rhyme each time, which had the added effect of distracting me from the fact that my kids weren't listening to me. I changed the rhymes all the time and before I knew it, they were joining in.

For some reason, rhymes make it easier to leave the playground. 

They weren't following directions any quicker, though. Which is why I'm not writing about a blog about discipline.


If you'd like to learn more, read what some women with ph.D's have to say.