The Lakes South Morang College Newsletter COLLEGE CONNECTIONS
FOUNDATIONS FOR READING A vital foundation for learning to read and write is phonological awareness. This is the ability to hear the sounds in words and
has a few different sub skills. Phonological awareness is strongly linked to reading success and is a daily focus in our Prep Literacy program. Word awareness is the ability to recognise that a sentence is made up of individual words and to be able to discriminate these words. In Prep we teach students to ‘ clap the words in a sentence ’. This is a fun activity that can also be done at home together. Syllables are the natural beats in words eg: mon/key (2 syllables), el /e/phant (3 syllables), in Prep we teach children to listen for, clap and count the syllables in words, usually by clapping or tapping. Rhyming words end in the same sound eg: cat, hat, rat, boat/ coat, clown/town. In this area we sing lots of songs with rhyme, read books and engage in hands on activities and games.
Children need to be able to identify when two words rhyme and produce their own rhymes.
Phonemic awareness is being able to hear individual sounds in words. If a child has strong phonemic awareness, they could listen to the sounds c - a - t and know this is the word cat. A little further along the journey will be phoneme manipulation . This is the ability to listen to a word like ‘ cat ’ and repeat ‘ cat ’ but without the ‘ c ’ eg: ‘ at ’. They also change the first sound eg: change the ‘ c ’ to an ‘ s ’ then ‘ cat ’ becomes ‘ sat ’. We also build strong letter sound awareness. This is when we introduce the written letter to match the sounds and is what is meant by ‘ phonics ’. The child understands that the letter ‘ s ’ spells the sound s like in snake and be able to read and write this. We teach and revise letter/sound relationships every day. Our mornings include around 20 - 30 minutes of phonological awareness and phonics activities followed by reading a big book together and learning comprehension strategies like identifying who the characters are and sequencing the events in the book. After this we practise our letter formation and writing. These activities are also often linked to the letters and sounds we are learning at that time. With daily practise and revising these sounds often through the year we lay a very strong foundation upon which all other learning will be built upon.
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker