Second blog post: phonemic awareness

 

I hope everyone is having a great week so far and I welcome you back to our classrooms blog. I believe it is important to keep the communication between our classroom and families open therefore I will be posting a blog every week to provide an update on what the students have been involved in and why we are doing those particular activities. This week we have been focusing on phonemic awareness through the reading of books, singing songs and using “fingerplay” (using puppets to go along with a story or song). Phonemic awareness is a term associated with language that can sometimes be a tricky term to understand because it is very closely related to phonics and phonological awareness. However, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear the individual sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is an important component of literacy development and is the basis for understanding an oral language system.

Through phonemic awareness songs, books, games and more students will learn:

•  How to recognize individual sounds in words
• How to identify similar sounds in different words
• Learn new vocabulary words
• Learn how to read/expand on their reading skills

Understanding and learning how to hear and identify individual sounds in words is not easy and it is important for our classroom to be repeating the use of books, songs, and fingerplays in order for children to become more familiar with recognizing these sounds over time. The amazing thing with the students in our classroom is that they already have a general awareness of identifying these sounds because of the parents, grandparents, and siblings that work or play with them at home. I bet you did not even realize that! Children have begun to notice these individual sounds in words through the experiences they have already had listening to books being read aloud to them or listening to songs and rhymes. Thank you for your help, keep it up!  

In order to continue our work with phonemic awareness in our classroom I am asking if each child can bring in either a picture of their favorite food or a picture of their favorite animal. This will be a “show and tell” in which each student will present their picture to the class and then we will learn the name of the food or animal in each picture. As the children begin to become more familiar with each picture and the different sounds that can be heard through saying the name of the food or animal we will start to sort them by the beginning sounds and/or the ending sounds of each picture. This will be a fun activity that you can help your child with at home as well as a fun opportunity for our students to learn more about each other while developing their phonemic awareness. Thank you for helping your child choose a picture to bring into our class, I appreciate it very much!

If you are looking for more activities to do with your child to help them practice their phonemic awareness I have included a few links to activities, songs, and examples of fingerplays with puppets below. Please let me know if you have any questions or are looking for more activities to do with your child outside of class, I will be happy to provide more!
Down By The Bay

Activities for Phonemic Awareness

Banana Phone

Five Little Monkeys