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Teach Your Child To Swim

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One of the first steps in becoming a successful reader is to learn to recognize the letters of the alphabet. The alphabetic principle teaches that spoken language is represented by written words that are made up of varying combinations of letters, and that these letters and combinations of them make up all of the sounds in spoken language. Attaching sounds to these letters and learning to write them paves the way to successful reading and writing.

Learning to say their ABCs is a great start for any preschooler, but it is just as important for your child to learn the sounds of the letters. Preschoolers, who know the sounds of the letters of the alphabet, have an easier time learning to read.

In order to read, every child must know the sounds of the letters as well as the shapes and order. More than that he must be able to recall them quickly. When he sees the letter he should be able to say the letter or vocalize its sound without hesitation. This should happen whether he hears the letters in order or not.

While the alphabet song can be a fun way to start learning the ABCs it is not enough because children also need to be able to identify each individual letter. In fact, this skill is much more important than knowing where it falls in the alphabet as it is the key in learning to read.

Research shows it is important for young children to be able to:

~ Recognize and name letters

~ Recognize beginning letters in familiar words (especially their own name)

~ Recognize both capital and lowercase letters

~ Relate letters to the specific sounds they represent

Knowledge of the alphabet is the foundation to your child's literacy development and you shouldn't assume your child will learn this skill in kindergarten. Waiting until kindergarten to learn the ABCs will put your child behind many other students and may cause added stress.

Children who can read independently "translate" alphabet shapes accurately back into sounds. If we want our children to be able to read independently, we needed to teach them:

~ The shapes of the alphabet letters;

~ The various sounds of each letter;

~ The sounds made by combined letters.

You can start teaching the alphabet when your child is young. My son mastered his letters by his second birthday and I helped him do that without flashcards and without whining! He loves working with his "letters" and even now as he approaches his fourth birthday requests a particular game or activity. He doesn't know he's learning-he just thinks he's having fun with his Mommy.

There are many ways that you can help your preschooler learn the sounds and names of the letters of the alphabet.

You don't need expensive tools and programs and in fact many of those can be counterproductive as they make learning work. My greatest success was simply to work on letters in context with the world whenever he seemed open to the opportunity. The alphabet became simply a part of our daily life including errands and play time.

Teach Your Child To Swim

Phonological awareness is an important foundation for learning to read. Scientific research has documented that phonological awareness is a better predictor of reading success than IQ, vocabulary, or socioeconomic level of the family.

Research has shown that children who begin reading instruction with sufficiently developed phonological awareness understand the instruction better, master the alphabetic principle faster and learn to read quite easily.

Children who will later be identified as being dyslexic often do not have phonological awareness skills. Teaching these skills has been shown in research to prevent the occurrence of dyslexia in many children. Accordingly, many school systems now follow a program of early screening for phonological awareness skills.

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness. Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on childrens reading and spelling achievement.

Why Is Phonological Awareness So Important?

An awareness of phonemes is necessary to grasp the alphabetic principle that underlies our system of written language. Specifically, developing readers must be sensitive to the internal structure of words.

If children understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into words, they are able to use letter-sound knowledge to read and build words. As a consequence of this relationship, phonological awareness is a strong predictor of later reading success. Researchers have shown that this strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success persists throughout school.

Early reading is dependent on having some understanding of the internal structure of words, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is very effective in promoting early reading. However, instruction in early reading especially instruction in letter-sound correspondence strengthens phonological awareness.

Success in early reading depends on achieving a certain level of phonological awareness. Instruction in phonological awareness is beneficial for most children and critical for others.

What Is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the ability to break words into separate sounds. A child who has phonological awareness can tell you when two words rhyme and when two words start with the same sound. Further development of phonological awareness will allow the child to tell you when two words end with the same sound. For example, they can tell you that bat and sit end with the same sound but bat and sad do not end with the same sound.

Phonological awareness is a broad term that includes phonemic awareness. In addition, to phonemes, phonological awareness activities can involve work with rhymes, words, syllables, and onsets and rimes.

The key to the process of learning to read is the ability to identify the different sounds that make words and to associate these sounds with written words. In order to learn to read, a child must be aware of phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest functional unit of sound. For example, the word cat contains three distinctly different sounds. There are 44 phonemes in the English language, including letter combinations such as /th/.

In addition to identifying these sounds, children must also be able to manipulate them. Word play involving segmenting words into their constituent sounds, rhyming words, and blending sounds to make words is also essential to the reading process. The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of language is called phonological awareness. There are five levels of phonological awareness ranging from an awareness of rhyme to being able to switch or substitute the components in a word.

Children generally begin to show initial phonological awareness when they demonstrate an appreciation of rhyme and alliteration. For many children, this begins very early in the course of their language development and is likely facilitated by being read to from books that are based on rhyme or alliteration.

Teaching Phonological Awareness

Early experience with nursery rhymes can help children begin to notice and think about the phonological structure of words. Several research studies have shown that the children who know more about nursery rhymes at age 3, are those that tend to be more highly developed in general phonological awareness at age 4 and in phonemic awareness at age 6.

You dont have to stop with nursery rhymes though. Read rhyming books and sing rhyming songs and chants. Have children identify the rhyming words using picture cards and do rhyming sorts with picture cards.

Also play games that teach children to isolate individual sounds in a word. For example, this game can be played with the BINGO song. There was a letter had a sound and you can say it with me b, b, b, like ball Play the game Whats the First Sound in this Word This can be done orally or with picture cards

When children learn how to listen to language, they are also learning to connect oral language with the written word. Once they hear, know, and are able to manipulate sounds, they begin to realize how words work.

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