Our PreSchool Blog

Being able to auditorily recognize rhyming words is an integral part of a child’s phonemic awareness.  Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds-phonemes–in spoken words.  Phonemic awareness is important because it improves students’ word reading and comprehension while helping students learn to spell.

Incorporating rhyming and various sound activities at home can help your child develop a strong sense of phonemic awareness.  These can be simple activities that you can do together in the car on the way to school or to the grocery!  Have fun!

As we complete our unit on letter recognition and sound review this month we are focusing on matching lowercase letters to pictures with corresponding initial sounds.   The ability to understand the structure of spoken language plays a crucial part in reading success now and in the future.  It is very important for children to automatically be able to manipulate sounds in words (phonemic awareness) so that comprehension is the focus of reading rather than decoding unknown words.  We develop phonemic awareness (ability to  manipulate sounds in words) through a variety of consistent and age appropriate activities in which children are asked to recognize and manipulate sounds.

Young children learn through moving!  Each day during group time, we Lettercise together to practice our ability to hear and identify letter sounds (phonemic awareness).  Lettercise is a song by Dr Jean.  Dr Jean creates a wide variety of songs that teach both literacy and math!  If you want to Lettercise at home, you can find her CD here.  If you would like to hear the song, click on the first photo below.  We don’t use the video that it is linked to, we just use the song.  Get up and Lettercise!