Preschool Language Arts: Auditory Skills

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.