Letter recognition is an important skill students learn in preschool/kindergarten. This skill helps children understand how printed text relates to our spoken language.

This is not as easy as it may appear because children need to be able to do the following:

• recognize the size and shape of letters
• name the letter that goes with each shape
• produce the sound of the letter
• and write the letter

Today I’m going to model a fun way to practice recognition and naming of letters.

You will need a clear jar or container with a lid, rice, and small objects with letters on them. I used letter beads, but you could use things like Scrabble pieces or rocks with letter written on them.

Place the rice and letters in the jar and have your child shake the jar gently. When they find a letter they tell you the letter name. If they know their letters, they can find a letter and tell you the sound the letter makes. If they can write the letters, have them record the letters they’ve found on a piece of paper. If they are ready, challenge them to make words with the letters they found.

Have fun!

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word. There are 44 phonemes in the English language.

Today I’m going to be sharing about phoneme isolation which is the ability to identify where a sound appears in a word or position. In this video I will be concentrating on initial (beginning) phonemes.

Syllables are the parts of words and each part contains a vowel. Within the skill of syllables there are 3 skills that need to be practiced (blending, segmenting, & deleting).

Rhyming is the second step in Phonological Awareness.

Please watch the following video for ideas on how to practice this skill.