Little Girls Learning: Trying out our New Skills

Today I was excited to try some of the new things I'd learned about teaching phonemic awareness and math. We started this morning just reading a short passage from Mark 1 from the NLT. I really want to be diligent with reading Scripture with Norah, and finding verses to memorize too.

Next we tried a few of the phonemic awareness activities. I asked her to clap to each sound of a sentence with me. She caught on to this right away, and even made up her own sentences to clap and did really well dividing the sounds. I wasn't sure she'd know what a "sentence" was but she figured it out right away and was really creative thinking of sentences.

Then we tried an activity for blending syllables. For example, I said a word like "Bas - ket- ball" slowly and she had to say clearly the word I had said. This was easy for her.

We also segmented syllables, and she had to clap to each syllable in a word. Again, easy for her.

Next we tried deleting syllables. This is where we rested for the day. It was more challenging. She seemed to understand generally but definitely needs to practice. I was really impressed with her overall understanding though, because the things I was asking her were difficult. For this activity I would say a word like "Sunday" and then ask her to say the word without a syllable, such as without "Sun." She didn't understand at first what I meant. I sang her the "BINGO" song to show her how to leave out letters or parts of a word. Then I made up a song to the same tune using a longer word, like "Ladybug." Each time I sang it I clapped for a missing syllable. She started to understand a little better. She made it more complicated too by suggesting we try the word "zoo" and take off the "z." This is where I am trying to steer her, to where she understands the individual letter sounds blend to make words.

Then we took out her wooden letters (pieces from a letter puzzle) and I asked her to find the letters of her name. She did really well with this and only needed a little direction from me. I also asked her which letters had straight or curvy lines (an idea from Reading Resource). I had her then practice writing her name. While she started putting her letters away, I was thinking about what to do next for some numbers, but she chose our next activity instead by noticing that her letters came in a few different colors. She started grouping the letters by color (of course, she loves to organize anything). That gave me an idea to have her count the letters in each group. Then I also thought she could make a simple graph to chart how many letters in each color. That gave us the chance to then practice writing numbers and looking at which groups had more, less, or the same. We had fun exploring all of that. We will definitely keep practicing writing the numbers and working on more and less. We had so much fun though and it was so easy to find an activity just with a few simple tools.