soundS to wordS: at home
Hey friend,
Since I put my FREE phonemic awareness series out into the world, my family took a vacation to visit family in Wisconsin, and then we moved to Alabama. Woah. The humidity down here is a real thing. We worked on updating the floors and paint colors in the whole house and are now ready to find our new routine.
I've heard from several friends and read many worried-parent posts about this upcoming school year. There are so many unknowns, and there are so many parents saddling up and preparing to do their best with a homeschool curriculum or a virtual learning experience. Whatever you chose, good for you. Now believe in yourself and believe in them.
If you are the parent of a rising kindergartener or even first grader (hopefully you checked out my phonemic awareness freebies and you're rocking those), here is how I tackled some word work at the phonic level with Merritt during laundry last week. I gave her a piece of paper and a pen and told her to listen to the sound I made and then write the letter that makes that sound. I gave her the most common sound of the following letters; a, m, s, f, c, p, t, i. I made sure she was forming the letters correctly and paused my towel-folding to help her re-do a letter if needed.
** Handwriting impacts the imprinting of a letter onto the brain, so make sure they are forming letters correctly and with the same start point every time, (i.e., the letter 'i' always starts at the midline, pull down to the ground line, then pick up the pencil to dot). Before we moved on, I had her read back the letter names and sounds of the letters that were now on her paper.
Next, I gave her CVC words to spell. I have small plastic letters, so I pulled out the a, m, s, f, c, p, t, and i and put them across the table in front of her. Using only these letters, we practiced spelling words; sat, fat, mit, fit, sit, cat, tap, tip.
I modeled the first word by saying it slowly and pulling down the letter that matched the sound, "sssssss (as I pulled down the s)… aaaaaaaaaa… t (can't hold this sound out, so I over-exaggerate it)". Merritt then segmented and pulled down the corresponding plastic letter to match the sounds of fat, mit, fit, sit, cat, tap, tip. Once I checked that she pulled down the correct letters in the right order, she wrote the word on her paper. Merritt segmented every word on her own and beamed with pride while I made it through my least favorite household chore. Before she left my room, I had her go back and read the words she wrote. So, during laundry, we worked on phonics (matching letters to sounds), segmenting to spell, and ended with blending to read.
The next time we do this task, I will swap out letters and keep any that caused a struggle. A struggle may mean that the child hesitated with her letter formation, or her recall of the letter to the sound wasn't automatic, or she completely matched a letter to a sound incorrectly. For these types of tasks, you want to work at a level that your child is thriving and work each phoneme/letter to mastery.
A sequence that I refer to for letter/sound introduction is as follows: m, a, t, s, b, f, c, i, h, n, p, d, g, r, o, j, l, u, w, k, e, y, v, x, qu, z. If your child is successful with these individual letters and sounds, you could sneak in digraphs, two letters that make one sound: sh, th, ch.
A final reminder; at this level, the vowel sounds are all short, and the handwriting is all lower case. Remember to take advantage of your child's most awake and alert moments. If this happens to be while you are folding laundry and knocking out your list of a million things to do, so be it.
Continue to let me help by educating you on the step-by-step process of literacy learning backed by science. Do these things, and your child will improve! Ready, set, BEGIN.
(Grab the phonemic awareness email course under products)