Phonological Ideas
Phonics refers to the sounds letters make and how we use these sounds to form words. Learning phonics is an important skill to acquire when learning how to read. The teacher instructs students in phonological awareness as early as preschool. There are various lesson plans the teacher can incorporate into the classroom for learning phonics and many of these activities are interactive and engage children in learning how to form sounds and begin to read.
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Rhyming Words
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Recognizing rhyming words is an important concept in phonemic awareness. Understanding how similar sounds work together to form various words is an important pre-reading skill that children need to learn to decode words and read through phonics. Present the children with rhyming words on flash cards or through song so they can understand how rhyming words are made up of phonological sounds.
Blending Sounds
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Stretching and blending sounds to form words, otherwise known as sounding out words, is a phonological lesson students learn before beginning to read. When learning phonics, students are taught onset and rime. Onset refers to the sounds in words before the beginning vowel, and rime refers to all sounds in the word from the first vowel to the end of the word. A good phonological idea for learning onset and rime is to present words to students on a whiteboard that contain phonics. Students can practice reciting these words and blending sounds.
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Letter Sounds
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Introduce flash cards to students with upper and lower case letters. Have students sort the letter flash cards by the sounds they hear. Students may use these letters to form words. After forming words, students can start forming sentences with the words. This activity is a phonological exercise that teaches students the sounds the letters of the alphabet make, and how they are used to form words.
Dipthongs
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Learning how two separate vowel sounds combine to form one sound is a lesson in dipthongs, which is part of phonological awareness. A phonological idea to assist students in learning about dipthongs is to divide the class into two groups and pass out blank index cards along with one index card that contains words with dipthongs such as "ow, ou, oi, oy." Students look at the dipthongs and try to think of a word that contains the sound and write them on their blank index cards. If students are not sure of the spelling of a word they may look it up in a dictionary. All the words can be arranged on the classroom word wall so that students may refer to them throughout the school year.
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References
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