Our PreSchool Blog

Letter and Word Awareness is the ability to identify individual written letters and words.  Once children are able to identify printed letters, they develop the ability to identify entire words. The entire developmental progression from letter awareness to word awareness to fluent reading typically begins around age three with letter awareness and continues through age five, six or seven with fluent reading. Our K Prep class is beginning working on understanding that words are groups of letters separated by spaces on either side. Children’s names are the most important word to them, so what better place to start!

The K prep students have been working hard on TWO books this past week and during our short week this week. Our sight word focus has been on the words am & at. This is a precursor to our introduction to word families which begins when we return from Thanksgiving Break. We interacted with the sight words in a variety of ways and have been enjoying our time buddy reading the books we have mastered.

At Creative Tots, we have learned that students rely heavily on their senses to process information when learning. This means it is more easily accessible to your children as there are more ways the information can be triggered and retrieved from their brain. We all have different learning styles and we strive to make lessons beneficial to all your children.  Our goal is to make learning a fun and multi-sensory experience to help children remember and retain information more effectively. One way we achieve this during our daily writing groups is through sensory writing. Using a textured material under their paper during their writing activity allows the brain to not only see the letter that’s in front of them but also FEEL the letter as they write it. Not to mention, it’s fun!! Playful Learning at work.

Roll the die, identify the number, count out that many poms into your cup. The first person to fill their cup wins!

(Obj: Number Recognition, one to one correspondence, counting and fine motor development)

The first step to reading readiness is being able to understanding that there is a relationship between letters and sounds through written language. Children who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of spoken words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to letters when they see them in written words. Before reading groups begin, our K Prep students are working hard (and playing hard) to connect each letter with the sound it makes as well as identifying the first sound in a spoken word. How do we learn this important skill in K Prep?  Playful learning!

Measuring reading, writing, ordering by size and more!

We continued our animal exploration during reading groups this week as we reviewed many of the sight words we have been studying.  Do You Eat Grass? by Bruce Larkin is one of the many Bruce Larkin readers we use during reading groups throughout the school year that helps our young readers develop the skills they need to blossom into independent readers.