Phonemic Awareness Activities For Early Reading Success

Phonemic awareness--the understanding that words are made up of sounds--is essential to a child's early reading success. With this book, children gain this awareness through activities that are easy to teach and engaging. Children play with sounds through songs, rhymes, poetry, picture games, and other exercises. The activities cover the five basic levels of phonemic awareness: * the ability to hear rhymes and alliteration; * to do oddity tasks; * to orally blend word and split syllables; * to orally segment words; * to do phonemic manipulation tasks. Blends critical reading skills with joyful word play. For use with Grades K-2.

This volume is designed to prevent and correct most word-level reading difficulties. It trains phonemic awareness and promotes sight vocabulary acquisition, and therefore reading fluency.

This book is an ideal resource for any teacher who wants to include explicit phonemic awareness instruction in an early reading program. In one easy-to-use 8 1/2" x 11" volume, the authors present three separate sets of phonemic awareness lessons, complete with scripted directions and reproducible learning materials and assessment tools. Incorporating a variety of fun and engaging activities, each set of lessons is field-tested and research-based. Included are developmentally sequenced lessons for the whole class and small groups, more intensive lessons for children struggling with phonemic awareness, and class lessons on the consonant phonemes to help children hear and process the sounds of American English. The lesson sets can be used independently or in combination with each other, and can easily be adapted to meet the needs of specific classes.

This invaluable supplementary curriculum meets Reading First criteria and contains numerous classroom-ready activities designed to increase the phonemic awareness and preliteracy skills of preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade students.

Experts are raving about this "must-have" resource for primary teachers that includes dozens of fun activities to help children listen to language and play with sounds. Activity cards can be cut out and laminated to create a handy reference file of fun ideas. A wide selection of reproducibles (picture cards, word cards, and manipulatives) is included.

Beginning to Read reconciles the debate that has divided theorists for decades over what is the "right" way to help children learn to read. Beginning to Read reconciles the debate that has divided theorists for decades over the "right" way to help children learn to read. Drawing on a rich array of research on the nature and development of reading proficiency, Adams shows educators that they need not remain trapped in the phonics versus teaching-for-meaning dilemma. She proposes that phonics can work together with the whole language approach to teaching reading and provides an integrated treatment of the knowledge and process involved in skillful reading, the issues surrounding their acquisition, and the implications for reading instruction. A Bradford Book

Early Reading Instruction is a comprehensive analysis of the research evidence from early writing systems to computer models of reading. In this book, Diane McGuinness provides an innovative solution to the "reading war"—the century-old debate over the efficacy of phonics (sound-based) versus whole-word (meaning- based) methods. She has developed a prototype—a set of elements that are critical to the success of a reading method. McGuinness shows that all writing systems, without exception, are based on a sound unit in the language. This fact, and other findings by paleographers, provides a platform for the prototype. Other elements of the prototype are based on modern research. For example, observational studies in the classroom show that time spent on three activities strongly predicts reading success: learning phoneme/symbol correspondences, practice at blending and segmenting phonemes in words, and copying/writing words, phrases, and sentences. Most so-called literacy activities have no effect, and some, like sight word memorization, have a strongly negative effect. The National Reading Panel (2000) summarized the research on reading methods after screening out thousands of studies that failed to meet minimum scientific standards. In an in-depth analysis of this evidence, McGuinness shows that the most successful methods (children reading a year or more above age norms) include all the elements in the prototype. Finally, she argues, because phonics-type methods are consistently shown to be superior to whole-word methods in studies dating back to the 1960s, it makes no sense to continue this line of research. The most urgent question for future research is how to get the most effective phonics programs into the classroom.