awareness, beginning with word awareness, then syllables and progressing to sound units such as onset and rime, through phonemic awareness. The following sections focus on the more ‘shallow’ phonological awareness targets of word awareness, syllable awareness, rhyme and alliteration.
He is not consistently clapping each word, but they continue to work on it. When she sees him tiring of the activity, she tells him, “You can just listen, and I’ll clap the words,” modeling clapping the words for the rest of the book.
TEACHING WORD AWARENESS
Word Awareness Overview Word awareness is an early developing phonological aware- ness skill that does not require good vision. Instruction in word awareness should be brief, and should quickly lead to syllable awareness instruction. Schuele & Boudreau (2008) recommend starting first with one syllable words such as ‘Ann wants a bike’ because they are more obvious. Learners with CVI may also have motor impairments which make it difficult for them to ‘clap each word.’ Adults will need to be creative to identify ways that learners can show that they hear separate words. Learners might: stomp, blink, move head, sway, rock, or hit a tambourine with the elbow to indicate each word in a sentence. Adults and peers in a room can work together to identify the easiest way for each learner to demonstrate word awareness. Below are sample activities to support the development of word awareness. Beat Instructions: Preschool and kindergarten teachers of- ten have chanted instructions that they give, such as: “Line up, line up, everybody line up. Line up, line up, line up NOW!” The adults can begin representing each word with a clap, stomp, slap, etc. This activity does not require vision, but a partner can help the target student figure out a way to indicate each word. ‘ Beat the Words’ to a Short Poem or Nursery Rhyme. For this activity, learners listen to a poem or nursery rhyme while a helper reads it and taps, claps, snaps each word. Mini-Exam- ple: Eliberto had a hard time showing his awareness of different words. After a few days of this activity, Randall (the aide working with him) noticed that Eliberto was making small head move- ments to the right. Randall gave him informative feedback: “Hey buddy, I see you moving your head. You’re showing me that you hear those words. ‘Peas <clap> porridge <clap> hot <clap>.’ Let’s do it together.” Beat the Words in a Book with Short Sentences . Evan, age 15, is crazy about rollercoasters. His Mom downloaded a book about rollercoasters from the website, Tar Heel Reader (www.tar- heelreader.org ). She has printed and laminated the book and sometimes shows it on the computer. They have read the book together several times. For this activity, they are not going to look at the actual book, because she wants Evan to focus on lis- tening to the individual words. Mom tells Evan they are going to clap each word in the book. She reads the first page, clapping every word slowly. On the third page, she invites Evan to join in.
Image 13: Tar Heel Reader book
TEACHING SYLLABLE AWARENESS
Syllable Awareness Overview Gillon (2018) explains that syllable awareness requires aware- ness that words can be divided into syllables. Several complex rules of syllable division underlie this process, but we can keep it simple, and just help learners learn syllable segmentation, or saying the words in drumbeats. Thus, ‘cat’ has one drumbeat, while ‘caterpillar’ has four drumbeats. Syllable Awareness: Name Chants Personal names are a great way to introduce many skills, includ- ing syllable awareness, because they are familiar (students hear their own name and the names of their peers throughout the day), and they are highly personally meaningful. Name songs or chants that highlight the beats in a name can be used at various points in the day, as described below. Roll Call – I Have A Friend: ‘Songboards’ are the brain child of Carol Goossens. The song board ‘I Have a Friend’ was developed by Musselwhite (2019) to provide a visual support for a song that supports name identification and syllable awareness. The lyrics are “I have a friend and her name is Samantha, now we’ll stomp her
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