Thumbs Up UHPS: Term 4 has begun!

Saturday, November 05, 2011

Term 4 has begun!

All three Thumbs Up groups met this week. As most of the students are new to our phonological awareness groups we started by talking about skills that are important for us to learn - speaking and listening. We discussed how important it is to hear and say the sounds in words so that we can learn to read and write well.

Group one had fun playing with musical instruments. We copied each other's rhythm and used the instruments to give instructions. It was fun to listen for bells, claps and whistles that told us to walk, stop and jump. Now we had practised being good listeners, we listened to Mrs Wallwork telling a story and then we rang a bell once for every word we heard in a sentence. Everyone was REALLY good and we gave each other a big thumbs up!

Group two used the instruments to practice listening and following instructions too. Then we listened to a rhyming story and stood up whenever we heard a rhyme. That was fun! We were so good that we played a game of rhyme lotto. Grace was the winner, we all gave her a thumbs up.

Group three looked at lots of pictures of words made up of 2 or 3 letter sounds (phonemes). We found the beginning sounds, the ending sounds and some of us even found the middle sounds. We found the sounds in 'easy' words like D-O-G and C-A-T, then we moved on to harder words like SH-E-D and CH-I-CK. Finally we looked at some tricky words like L-A-M-P and D-R-U-M. Everyone tried really hard! Next time we will be thinking about 'blends' like BR, BR, CL.

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SPEECH SOUNDS

At Thumbs Up group when we learn about speech sounds we do not talk about letter names. When we talk we use lots of different sounds. At Thumbs Up group we talk about how those sounds are made. Some sounds can be long - like ssssss, llllll, mmmm, nnnnnnn. Some sounds are short 'popping sounds like p, t, k, b.

Practice saying some speech sounds and see if you use the front of your mouth or the back. Do you use your tongue to make a 't' sound? What about a 'g' sound? What happens to your tongue when you make a 'th' sound?

SYLLABLES

Syllables are little bits of words that last for one 'beat'. At Thumbs Up group we learn about syllables by clapping along to words.

For example; the word caterpillar has four 'beats' - we clap it out ... CAT-ER-PILL-AR. The word butterfly has three 'beats' ... BUT-ER-FLY.

Watch out for those tricky one syllable words - sometimes students will put in an extra clap - CAR-AR instead of CAR or BO-OK instead of BOOK.

Practice clapping out the syllables in names...soon you'll be a Syllable Superstar !!

RHYME

Not everyone knows how to rhyme. Recognising rhyming words helps us to group words into 'families' which in turn helps us to read and spell those words. Rhyming can be lots of fun but only if you understand it. Lots of children find Dr Seuss books funny - but if you aren't able to hear and recognise the rhymes the books won't make sense! At Thumbs Up group we do lots and lots of rhyming activities, helping the students firstly to hear rhyme and later to begin to generate their own rhyming words.

A great way to help at home is to read rhyming books and poems or sing rhyming songs - old fashioned nursery rhymes are great for this!

BEGINNING SOUNDS

Being able to identify the initial sound of a word is the first step along the path to sounding out words. At Thumbs Up group we play lots of games finding words that start with the same sound. When the students are able to consistently find words beginning with a certain sound they can begin to think of their own.

I-spy is a great game to practise this skill - but to develop phonological awareness we only use sounds, not letter names. Because we use only sounds we can also include words that begins with diagraphs - 'th', 'ch', 'sh' and 'wh'.

SOUNDS AT THE END OF WORDS

When the children have mastered the skill of identifying the initial sound in a word we begin to isolate the end sound. This can be quite tricky at first but playing games can make this fun! "I-spy something ending with...." could be lots of fun on a car trip.

At Thumbs Up group we like to play an end sound guessing game. Put number of small objects on a table (such as a peg, pencil, plastic dinosaur, comb, dice...anything that comes to hand will do). Then take it in turns to choose an object and say the ending sound (remember, sound not letter name) and see if the other player can find the correct object.

SEGMENTING AND BLENDING

Now comes the REALLY hard work! All the skills the children have been developing are used together to segment (sound-out) words and blend sounds together.

The segmenting skill is used every time the children write an unfamiliar word in class. If they can segment the word into sounds, then they have a good idea of which letters they need to use and in which order.

Blending comes in useful when trying to read unknown words. If a student knows how to blend individual sounds together they can confidently attempt to read words they have not come across before.