Friday Foto

Learning Phonics

Atticus loves sounds and learning the phonetic sound of letters.  He loves to play a game, that helps him learn the name and the sound of each letter.  First, I write the letter on a sticky note

Then Atticus finds things around the house that start with that sound.

up

umbrella

  English is very difficult to learn because letters sometimes have different sounds.  I simplify for kids this age, and once they can sound out simple phonetic words, then they can learn the thousands of words that break the rules of phonetics.  Even so, knowing phonetics will usually help in sounding out a word they don't know.

leaf

 I used to do this with the kids in my classroom, and they all love it.  They got to move around the classroom, and it got them thinking about the application of sounds, how sounds form words that describe objects all around us.  Language is very abstract, and this helps make it real, less abstract.

 I give Atticus a turn to write some letters 

And we store the letters to use again next time we want to play the game!  When ever he says "There is nothing to do" I pull out this jar and he gets busy!