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September 2023
February 2024
Preparing our Future Readers
One of our goals in preschool is to focus on the importance of authentic, play based experiences to help foster language development. As our students' language advances, phonological awareness skills will also begin to emerge. These skills are of utmost importance and will continue to develop from the early preschool to elementary school years.
The term phonological awareness can seem daunting or complicated, but the meaning is actually quite simple. It is the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the sounds in spoken language. Phonological awareness skills include the ability to:
- Rhyme (pig and wig sound the same at the end).
- Syllabification (Count the number of syllables in a word. Butterfly has three syllables bu-tter-fly).
- Recognize Alliteration (words with the same beginning sound, pencil and pasta).
- Onset-rime blending and segmenting (breaking words apart).
- Phonemic awareness (recognizing the smallest units/individual sounds (phonemes) in words).
These skills are practiced orally and do not include written letters or words. At school we utilize the Heggerty curriculum to practice these key concepts, but these skills can be practiced anywhere and without the need for a guide/curriculum.
Research has found that strong phonemic awareness is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success. We encourage our families to carry over these same skills practiced at preschool in the home setting. All of the skills can be introduced simultaneously, as one skill does not need to be mastered before moving on to the next. Make this learning fun, spontaneous, and embed it into your daily practices. Maybe the car ride to preschool is a great time to practice rhyming skills or at breakfast is when you play the "I Spy" sound game. Perhaps make a habit of reading the book with alliteration before bed time. It is never to early to build a strong foundation for early literacy development!
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