10 Embedded Pre-Literacy Activities... Here's some ways we've been doing it!

1. Play with SOUND! So much of decoding words in the future starts with careful listening in early childhood.

2.  SOUND Explore Tables: this table had all things beginning with the /b/ sound. Simply naming the objects in the Explore Table produces natural opportunities to HEAR alliteration.  Some of the things in this set up included "beach sand," books, bears, bugs, butterflies, balls, buttons, large beads, flashcards with B words and letter, and blocks.

In addition to objects beginning with the /b/ sound, hidden magnet B letters and wooden letter B's were in the "beach" to be found and touched as well.  Finally, as we played, we made stories with the toys, like: "The blue bears sit on buttons around the bead table. They are having bumblebee soup!" or "Bugs are riding on the bus all the way to the beach!"

3.  Chatting with friends! It's true that this is a pre-literacy skill because conversation with peers and adults help children's vocabulary grow which is required for reading comprehension in the future.

Role play isn't a waste of time!  It's a natural opportunity to talk, assume the role/feelings/behaviors of another person or animal, and develop cognitive and language skills.

4.  Rhyming pups: we love playing with puppies and kitties! These toys made by Learning Resources allow us to make mis-matched rhyming pups which are terribly silly!  When we fix the pups, we HEAR two words that rhyme correctly.  (See how much hearing factors into literacy?)

5. Letter names, recognition, and shapes: Letters are symbols for SOUNDS, and as children develop, they memorize the names and sounds of each letter.  Pre-literacy includes being able to see different kinds of lines that make up letters. Some letters have "holes." Some letters are completely curvy.  Other letters are made up of straight lines that go in different directions. This peg toy by Coogam helps children look at what kinds of lines make up a letter, and focus their attention on which direction those lines are going.

6.  Read a book, and act it out! Caps for Sale became a huge hit for our kids last week, and we used our rug cushions to pretend to be cap peddlers.  Acting out a story demonstrates the ability to recall the order of events in a story, and understand the plot of the story. Both skills are critical for reading comprehension.

7. Read for fun! During Work Time, the children often choose to look at books or invite the teacher to read them individually.  Young children can identify the difference between pictures and texts, tell their own version of the story based on pictures, and ask for help to know "what do these words say?". 

8. Gross motor development: This seems to be an unusual skill set to include with pre-literacy development, but they are connected. The brain learns to integrate information from multiple senses (visual, tactile, vestibular, proprioceptive, and even auditory) through gross motor opportunities. As the senses become more integrated, the child develops the ability to focus their eyes on targeted words on a page, track words across a page, and even keep letters oriented and in the correct order while reading.  Without well developed coordination and balance, decoding and tracking words becomes SO laborious for the reader, that reading comprehension becomes nearly impossible.

So climb, and dance, and run, and crouch, and jump as much as possible.

9. Scanning: this Melissa and Doug toy is intriguing to young children because they enjoy the cause and effect of dropping in the spool and see it spin down the ramp, but this also helps the children develop the ability to track an object moving left to right and back again.

10.  Drawing: The children have free access to the Art Area during Work Time and are provided multiple choices for mark making (paint, markers, crayons, pencils). The advantage of free form mark making is that it engages more areas of the brain than tracing does. Here is a sample piece of art done by one of our two-year olds that demonstrates she is developing the ability to draw curves, straight lines, circles, and dots.  These are all lines she will later learn to associate with letter shapes, and are a precursor to writing.  Furthermore, she is learning that marks have meaning.

It seems like "just play," but each of these distinct (yet related) methods of developing pre-literacy skills are fundamental for children to experience prior to formal academic education.  How can you bring more of these ideas into your home and environment? :)

Thankful for Books!

Earlier this month, Harmony's House hosted a book fair through Usborne.  Thanks to FIVE FABULOUS FRIENDS of Harmony's House, we got all of the books and games pictured above for FREE!  Wow!  We are so thankful to our friends who ordered books.  Your orders helped us earn over $300 to buy books for the classroom.  And, boy do our friends LOVE to read!

We read inside, we read outside, we read alone and with a buddy, we read on our teacher's lap and on the couch and on the rocking chair.  We read fairy tales, we read non-fiction, we read about animals and space, we read about Pinkalicious and Pete the Cat.  We read A LOT.  If you were one of the friends who ordered books through our book fair, please know how grateful the children are here for the new books.  We have already started putting our new reads to use.  <3

Bippidy Boppidy Boo

Friend "Kangaroo" has been begging all summer to make a new "magic wand" because her old one broke.  During the last week of school... we did it!  First we painted bubble wrap, stamped our papers on it, and added glitter.  When we came back to the project later in the day, the school friends decided what shape they wanted their wands to be.  We taped a dowel rod inside and wallah, a new magically fantastical wand!

Next we used these in Circle Time where we read one version of the Cinderella story.  The fairy godmother is depicted as having a wand with a star.  When we got to the point in the story where the fairy godmother uses her wand to transform pumpkins into coaches, mice into horses, a toad into a driver, etc. the children helped too by completing the rhyme!

For example, Ms. Harmony would say: "Bippidy boppidy boach, I turn this pumpkin into a ...." and the children would respond "Coach!"  We all waved our wands while working our magic.  ;)  Soon we helped Cinderella get to the ball, return home safely, try on shoes, and marry a prince.

This art/literacy combo activity was definitely a "happily-ever-after" choice for this group!

Preschoolers as Scientists

"Let's do what scientists do!  We'll study something, look at it up close, touch it, smell it, listen to it, and think... then write down what we've learned.  We can record our ideas with words, pictures, or tracing."

This was our Small Group prompt on Tuesday.  The children were each given a clipboard, pencil and sheet of paper.  They could choose a magnifying glass, and from a variety of star fish, sea shells, and shark teeth from the basket.

Some things we learned during this activity is that only the swirly shells sound like the ocean.  Flatter shells, starfish, and shark teeth do not.

We used a lot of descriptive language like: smooth, spiky, rough, tooth-like, sharp, spiral, striped, and so much more.  The students were encouraged to write or draw these words.

We even learned where the starfish mouth was!  Imagine eating from your belly button!  Starfish have a mouth right in the center of their bodies.  Tracing the starfish was challenging as well.  All of the starfish that we used had five legs.

 Here are some samples of the notes the children made.

Toddler "K" (age 2) "traced" her star fish by drawing circles around it.  She made some squiggles which she indicated were the words "starfish."  Ms. Harmony helped her write out the letters so another adult could read her words.

Friend "K" (age 5) traced her starfish and shark tooth independently.  She also drew her representations of seashells and labeled her diagrams.  She sounded out the words she wanted to write and wrote the letters herself.  If she was uncertain about a sound, Ms. Harmony would help her identify the correct letters like, /sh/ and /oo/.

Loving Literacy

 

During February, Ms. Harmony hosted the first ever book fair through Usborne Books for Harmony's House.  We raised $250 of free money for books!  This is one of the children's all-time FAVORITE books: There's a Mouse about the House!  This poor mouse has been loved to pieces, literally.  He's about to split into two pieces.  What makes this book so fun for the kids is that he slips between the pages to move the story along.  The mouse runs through cereal boxes, through cracks in the floor, up the clock, and even into a nightgown!  He narrowly escapes the cat in his search for cheese.  Not only is the story silly and engaging, but the children love the challenge of pushing and pulling the mouse through the little slits in each page.  If you want engaging, skill-building, thought-provoking, and FUN books... Usborne Books is your company!

Writing a Plan

Some followers have recently read about how students at Harmony's House make plans prior to play.  One of the other planning methods included "writing a plan."  The children of Harmony's House range in age from two to five.  How does a child, who likely cannot spell or even know many letters, "write a plan?"  Can they?  Yes.  Here's how we do it!

An important pre literacy skill is to be able to hear separate words in a sentence.  So, although most of the students in preschool cannot write words with letters, they do have the fine motor ability to draw a line.  They practice hearing and writing by drawing one line per word as they say it.  In the plan featured above, the child (age 5) wrote one line for "Toy and Puzzle Area."  She then listened to her own words and wrote the first letter that she could hear: 'T' 'a' 'P' and 'A.'"  When she returned to her plan at Recall Time, she added a picture of herself doing the plan in the Toy and Puzzle Area.

Below is a plan written by another school friend (age 3).  He wrote, "Art Area."  Because he cannot write letters yet, he simply drew the lines to represent each word.  Then he added a picture of himself with a paint brush.  When he returned to this picture at Recall Time, he described the colors he used and how they mixed together.  He also detailed his painting method of doing quick sweeps with the brush called "scribble scrabble!  scribble scrabble!"

Here is a sample of another child's plan (age 4):  she drew lines to represent "work with balloons" and Ms. Harmony wrote the words beneath the lines.  She drew the balloons that she wanted to play with.  When she came back to her plan at Recall Time, she colored the balloons, added letters to the "words" that she wrote, and talked about what she did with her friends.

Did she follow her plan?  Absolutely!  And she wrote about it too!

Pre-literacy- it's about what you hear

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!

Polar STEAM!

Weather at the Poles is cold, cold, cold!  But the polar adventures at Harmony's House have been downright steamy!

What is STEAM?  STEAM is an acronym for Science, Technology/Tools, Engineering, Art, and Math.  This is a summary of the STEAM opportunities that the students of Harmony's House have experienced during their studies of polar animals.

(While so many of these activities could fall into a few STEAM areas, Ms. Harmony has tried to evenly assign the lessons across the subject areas.)

SCIENCE-
Penguin Movements:  Although, penguins are birds, they do not fly.  After reading a book about penguins in Circle Time, we tried out what it would be like to move like penguins.  To experience having short legs, we tied bandannas around our ankles and attempted to walk around.  We also hopped and pretended to slide on our bellies and swim.  The students learned about the various ways penguins, as polar birds, move around.

Finish the story:  During Small Group, Ms. Harmony read the first part of this book Little Polar Bear.  Then she invited the children to use their knowledge of these Arctic animals and the environment around the North Pole to finish the story in their own way.  After devising our own ending to the story of helping little Lars to find his way home, Ms. Harmony read the ending that the author chose for the little polar bear.

TECHNOLOGY/TOOLS-
Ocean Jello:  Many polar animals use the ocean as a method of survival because it is a source of food.  The fish, squid, penguins, seals, walruses, and whales find their feasts in the ocean.  To discuss the subject of animal feeding habits, we mixed up a small box of blue jello during Small Group.  In addition to talking about the phase change from liquid to solid and feeding habits of the animals, we also learned the names of cooking tools such as "liquid measuring cup" and "wire whisk."  After the jello set up, we enjoyed eating it with Cool Whip "snow" on top!

Puzzles and Magnifying Glasses:  This puzzle had a map and pictured animals found at both the North and the South poles.  After completing the puzzle in Small Group, we used magnifying glasses to search for the different animals.  We determined that penguins are only found in the southern hemisphere, while the Arctic circle has a wider range of animal diversity, and yet no penguins.  Further discussion about how the students interacted with the magnifying glasses can be found in this post.

ENGINEERING-
Polar Landscaping:  The children were invited to use loose parts such as stones, flattened marbles, cotton balls, felt, and Arctic animals to create these animal homes.

ART-
Black and white collage:  During Small Group, the students tore pieces of black paper while we discussed why animals that live at the poles often have black skin (even if its under white fur!) or feathers.  This color is best for absorbing heat from the Sun!  Polar animals also often have white fur or feathers for camouflage purposes.  Once the paper was torn, the school friends glued it onto white paper in collage fashion according to their personal preferences.

Pipette Icicles:  "What is an icicle?" Friend "K" asks.  That was a great question that we attempted to answer through an art experience.  Icicles are made when water melts, drips, and then refreezes.  We used pipettes at the easel with diluted grey and blue paint to see how liquid drips down.  More can be read on this activity here.

MATH-
Iceberg Number Recognition and Counting:  Ms. Harmony prepared these "icebergs" with numbers 1-10, star foil stickers, laminant, and blue painters tape.  First the children put the numbers in order.  If they weren't sure which number they had, they counted the stars to find out.  Then we tossed a beanbag on the icebergs.  Whichever number it landed on, the child hopped (like a penguin) to the iceberg and shouted out the number.

Snowflake geometry and shapes: This was one of our most recent awesome experiences!  The children learned about a new shape called HEXAGON that has six sides.  Snowflakes, although 100% unique, share a common trait of having six sides.  The school friends used large shapes to design their own "snowflakes" all over the rug during Circle Time.

We have really enjoyed the STEAM power through our studies of animals at the North and South poles!