Category: Auditory Discrimination

Preschool Language Arts: Auditory Skills

8/31/2014

Often, people think of preschool language arts as nothing beyond letters and words. However, it is the teacher's duty to prepare each child to become a fluent reader and competent writer. This requires many skills before and beyond letter recognition. There are five main areas into which we group our Language Arts Standards: Fine Motor Skills, Auditory Skills, Visual Skills, Thinking/Conceptual, and Language.

This blog entry will cover the Academic Standards that fall under Auditory Skills.

While repeated exposure to activities/games that include these concepts is paramount to the child's understanding, it is important to understand that a young child may not "get" a particular concept until he is developmentally ready.

Auditory Memory - This is the ability to remember and repeat a sequence of sounds or words that has been presented solely through auditory means.

Auditory Discrimination: Rhyming

Auditory Discrimination: Phonemic Awareness - The child can distinguish different environmental sounds or letter sounds.

Auditory Figure-Ground Discrimination - The child can distinguish one sound (a bell, teacher's voice) from many background sounds.

Auditory Discrimination: Beginning and Ending Letter Sounds

Synthesizing - Synthesizing is a skill requiring a child to put the sounds together. Given three separate sounds, /s/, /u/ and /n/, the child can combine the sounds to come up with the word "sun".

Segmenting into Syllables

Auditory Skills are just one small part of preschool Language Arts. We have broken Auditory Skills into seven standards:

Auditory Memory
Auditory Discrimination: Rhyming
Auditory Discrimination: Phonemic Awareness
Auditory Figure-Ground Discrimination
Auditory Discrimination: Beginning and Ending Letter Sounds
Synthesizing
Segmenting into Syllables

In our classroom, each lesson, game or classroom material has been intentionally planned and placed in the room to fulfill our Academic Content Standards.

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Auditory Discrimination Game

3/24/2014

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Auditory discrimination is the ability to recognize the difference between sounds. We often take this to mean letter sounds or rhyme, but any type of sound could be used to practice auditory discrimination.

This game uses animal sounds.

For this game, the cards are flipped upside down and a child chooses one card. He then makes the sound of the animal on the card.

The first child to guess the correct animal gets to hold onto the card for the rest of the game.

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Dr Seuss's Birthday Celebration: Day One

3/3/2014

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Today in small group we read There's a Wocket in my Pocket by Dr Seuss.

Rhyming is a fun way for children to play with words, but it also increases their phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is a better predictor of a child's future success in reading than IQ or perceptual ability.

We talked about how Dr Seuss used nonsense words in the story, and how that means that a "wocket" can look however we imagine it.

Then we practiced making wockets out of clay. The children did an excellent job of describing their wockets.
"Mine has big ears and a long body."
"Mine has fluffy hair and a stubby tail."
"Mine has one leg and four hands."
"Mine has two eyes, a nose, and a smile."
"Mine has hair, two arms, two legs, and a skinny tail."

Next, they drew and colored their wockets.

Finally, they were able to put them in their "pockets" to take home.

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More Letter Sounds!

2/26/2014

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We practice letter sounds A LOT. Here, the children are stamping the letter that makes the beginning sound from the picture (spider, list, lion fence).

An individual activity like this works as an assessment, so that the teacher can keep a running list of what the child needs help with.

While we do not need to conduct formal assessments every day, we must always be assessing whether or not our students are understanding the concepts we are teaching. If we move on before the children are MASTERING the concepts, we are creating frustration and confusion.

Our goal is to practice these letter sounds until they are committed to the child's long term memory. As these activities get easier and easier, the begin to turn into 'rote' learning. Once they become 'rote', the children can commit more of their brain to higher level thinking and problem solving.

Mastery Learning: You don't practice until you get it right. You practice until you can't get it wrong.

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Working on the Short "A" Sound

2/22/2014

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Our preschoolers working on the short ‘a’ sound. These children are cutting out "aaaa" pictures and gluing them to a lowercase "a". We try to add a fine motor component, like cutting, to our activities every day.

We use the lowercase letter ‘a’ because the lowercase letters are more frequently used and therefore more important for children to be able to recognize and write.

I always refer to it as ‘the aaaaa letter’ (drawing out the short ‘a’ sound, as in ‘alligator’) to prevent confusion.

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Fishing for Letter Sounds

2/16/2014

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A common misconception in Early Childhood Education is that it’s important for children to know the NAMES of letters before they begin kindergarten (or reading).

A much more important skill is the ability for your child to be able to discriminate sounds (auditory discrimination).

These children are fishing for pictures that begin with the ‘ssssss’, ‘mmmmmm’, or ‘ffffffff’ sound. It is not necessary for the child to know any letter names in this activity. When she catches a ‘sssssssock’ fish, she puts it in the pail with the letter that says ‘sssss’.

There is a component of visual discrimination (remembering which letter makes which sound) to this activity, but for the children who do not remember, I will tell them what sound each letter makes. This keeps the integrity of the activity (sorting sounds).

We take our time with these letter sounds (it is preschool, after all) and let the children really MASTER each sound before moving on. Once they learn a few letter sounds and understand the concept, they begin to learn them VERY quickly, and it’s quite fascinating.

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Preschool Language Arts: Auditory Skills

Auditory Discrimination Game

Dr Seuss's Birthday Celebration: Day One

More Letter Sounds!

We practice letter sounds A LOT. Here, the children are stamping the letter that makes the beginning sound from the picture (spider, list, lion fence).

Working on the Short "A" Sound

Fishing for Letter Sounds

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