Phonemic Awareness and Phonetic Learning in F.I.R.S.T.
To ensure that phonological skills become firmly established, F.I.R.S.T. breaks down the process of learning to read into micro-actions and ensures a student has mastered each skill before moving on to the next. Each activity is presented in a strategic order and builds upon previous work, and opportunities for additional practice are available when necessary. This careful hierarchy gives the student the best opportunity to develop the most efficient sound system for reading. F.I.R.S.T.’s phonological activities include the essential pre-reading skills of alphabet recognition and sequencing. In Alphabet Mountain, the 26 letters of the alphabet are introduced in groups of three to five letters. F.I.R.S.T. begins with lowercase letters, as these are the letters most frequently seen in written text, and then progresses to uppercase letters. As learners practice the alphabet, they also engage in phonological activities to gain understanding of how sounds associate with letters. For students to master phonemic awareness skills, F.I.R.S.T. explicitly introduces and teaches each of the 44 sounds of the English language, beginning with those that are easiest to hear and blend: /m/, /s/, /oo/, and /ee/. The Cave of Sounds is one such auditory activity where students learn the 44 sounds. Students are tasked with listening for a particular phoneme, and when the phoneme is heard, they click or tap anywhere in the cave to progress on their journey. Easier sounds can be lengthened or held (e.g., “mmm…”), so that a student can get a good grasp of the sound before blending it with another sound. Because sounds are presented in a strategic order, decoding a word such as moon , made up of three of the sounds, is a manageable task for most young learners. Each of the 44 phonemes is purposefully repeated and practiced among activities and levels, ensuring students build facility and ultimately, automaticity, with each sound. In this way, phonemic awareness is seamlessly translated into phonics learning in the F.I.R.S.T. program. Once a sound (e.g., /m/) is mastered, F.I.R.S.T. provides repeated opportunities to reinforce the phoneme. Students will encounter the /m/ sound among other sounds and in other activities (e.g., blending, segmenting, rhyming, etc.) throughout the program to build automaticity with the phoneme. For example, by level six, students are blending consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, using /m/ with /ee/ or /oo/ and /aw/. By level 10, students are blending consonant-vowel- consonant (CVC) words that include /m/. As the program progresses and more phonemes are learned, students will continue to encounter the /m/ sound among sounds that are more difficult to hear and blend.
SCHOLASTIC F.I.R.S.T. FOUNDATION PAPER 10
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