Tips and Strategies » Playing With Sounds
The most important thing you can do is to help your child develop knowledge of letters and sounds, and to encourage playing with words. It seems silly to us as adults, but Dr. Suess was on to something with all of his rhyming and word-play books. Also, there are CDs of children’s songs that do an excellent job of playing with sounds through silly lyrics.
Although this sounds very elementary, some older students really struggle with manipulating sounds within words. This is more complex than it sounds because it requires students to hold a word in pieces while changing or dismissing one component of it. It really is a short-term memory workout for them.
There is a direct link between phonetic awareness and spelling. If a child doesn’t have phonetic awareness s/he won’t be able to spell correctly. Phonetic awareness is also necessary as children become more advanced readers as it allows them to manipulate affixes.
Phonetic Awareness tasks include silly songs or verbal word games like “I’m going on a camping trip and I’m taking an apple, a banana, a carrot.” or “I’m going on a camping trip and I’m taking a box, a balloon, a boy, a broom…” When children sort pictures according to beginning sound, ending sound, or vowel sound they are engaging them in phonetic awareness activities. Many children begin reading without having phonetic awareness firmly developed. This will eventually become problematic for them because they need to have the ability to break apart words, especially when the words become multisyllabic.
Phonics comes into play when sounds get attached to letters. If we have a child sort several pictures to a representative letter we have crossed the line into phonics.