Sometimes people get so caught up in letter recognition that they forget that a big part of learning to read is being able to hear. There is a lot of "hearing" that has to happen before children can decode (sound out) new words:
- hearing words as words in a sentence instead of one continuous series of spoken sounds
- hearing syllables in a word
- hearing parts of a word like beginning sounds or rhyming (ending sounds)
- and hearing the smallest unit of a word, a phoneme (cat has 3 phonemes: /c/ /a/ and /t/)
This is why so many "pre-literacy" activities in preschool focus on sound and rhythm with or without attaching sounds to letters. During Circle Time at Harmony's House, we used rhythm sticks to beat out syllables in our names, words from the Valentine's book we just read, and any words the children could think of. We learned that all of our current students have "2-beat" names (two syllables)!
As an extension activity, the teacher makes a beat with her rhythm sticks and challenges the students to copy the beat. While the children are having fun tapping the sticks together, they are developing important hearing skills that they will use later when learning to read. Happy tapping!
