The most crucial aspect of reading readiness is phonological awareness. It is the capacity of a child to listen and to manipulate sounds in the verbal words, independent of the letters. This critical skill set involves the ability to identify rhymes and counting of syllables and identification of starting sound, middle and ending sounds. The greatest predictor of early reading success is strong phonological awareness. As a part of our literacy program, in Elizabeth Fraley Kinder Ready, this is one of the main areas of development. Although our Kinder Ready Tutoring lessons offer professional, guided practice opportunities, Kinder Ready Elizabeth Fraley also has the mission of providing the parent with a simple, effective practice to enhance this learning at home; make the everyday situations a sound-play that has a rock-solid foundation to literacy.
Rhyme play is one of the most easily available and enjoyable activities that help to develop phonological awareness. Rhyming enables children to concentrate on the sound of the end of words, which is one of the important auditory discriminatory skills. This can be naturally incorporated at home by the parents into daily activities. An excellent start is singing familiar nursery rhymes or rhyming up silly songs in the car. The other effective activity is reading rhyming books together, then stopping to make the child guess the rhymes. This correlates with the Elizabeth Fraley Kinder Ready philosophy of opening the children to a variety of ways to learn; some of them will hear the rhyme in singing, other children will see the rhythm of a book, and this is something that all the children will learn and develop a positive connection to game playing with language.
Syllable awareness is another of the base activities. The mind should realise that words can be divided into beats or parts, which will form a significant milestone in sound breaking later. This can be kinesthetically practised by parents clapping, tapping or stomping out the syllables in words that they know well, such as family names, pet names or pet foods. It is made interesting by turning it into a game, i.e. sorting the toys in terms of the number of claps their names get. Such interactive play resembles the hands-on, multi-sensory approach employed in Kinder Ready Tutoring sessions, whereby learning is related to movement and interest to ensure maximum engagement and retention.
Lastly, sound isolation is an even more complex phonological skill that leads to phonics. Another game that parents may use is I Spy, but with sounds rather than with colours: I spy something that has the /b/ sound. The matching games in which a child identifies objects in the house that begin with the same sound (e.g., “sock,” “soup,” “soap”) are also very effective. It is in the secret of being light and festive. Whenever these activities are incorporated into the day naturally, the children grow up with an ear to sounds without considering it a lesson. This practice of reinforcing learning is a regular, play-based practice practised at home in addition to the specific instruction of Kinder Ready Tutoring, which forms a reinforcing loop of learning. When children learn these auditory skills, they become hugely confident about their skills of manipulating the language, and this kind of confidence directly carries over to confidence as they start to relate such sounds to letters. This combination of both home and professional direction will get the children fully equipped to decode words, which will put them on the path of becoming at least enthusiastic readers.
For further details on Kinder Ready’s programs, visit their website: https://www.kinderready.com/.
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