Reading

Rhyming Tree

What do you do when you have a friend who is an awesome mom, is super creative, and she shares her ideas with you, you share her ideas with everyone right?!?

Well, if you read my post “Read the Playroom” then you know how much I LOVED this: Look at the pictures and notice a few things…. 1) She has a print-rich room with a lot of the objects labeled and the room is a great place to be active and still function as a learning environment. Loving this! She has a rhyming tree and this is what she says about it:

“I saw the idea when I googled ‘playroom’ and someone had this as a bulletin board and I just made it specifically for rhyming. Anyway, this was super cheap to make! $15 for a roll of cork at Hobby Lobby (get it when it goes on sale for 50% or go online to print a 40% one item coupon and it’s even cheaper). Stuck it to the wall using double sided hanging tape, then at the Dollar Tree, bought a foam board for $1, cut it in half for the trunk. $0.99 for each bottle of paint at Hobby Lobby… I used 1 dark brown for the trunk, and 2 foliage green for the tree, printed off the words and used clip art from MS Word…. made this tree for under $12.
When I typed up the words on the computer, the first sound of the word I used a different color, and then all of the “at” rimes I used black so James can see that the ENDING sound is the same and the beginning is different.
I am working on putting a mailbox near the trunk of the tree that will hold letters of the alphabet so we can pull one letter out at a time and make a rhyming word, most will be nonsensical of course, but it will add to the fun of rhyming!”

Casey has a pre-k blog called http://prekplease.blogspot.com/ and her incredible kidspired creations are too cool to pass up!

If you get a chance to do a spin-off of the rhyming tree activity, please share it with all The Mommy Teachers!

Update from Casey: “The Dollar Tree had word strips (solid line at the top and bottom, dashed line in the middle) $1 for 30 so that I could label everything in the room.”

February 10, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

I Spy

Everyone knows the game “I Spy” where one player says “I Spy something….” and names something specific in the area and the other player has to find it.

Well, I am going to put a Phonemic Awareness spin on it which just means that I am going to make it a listening activity where your little one is listening to the “play on words” to identify the object.

If you read the post “What is Phonemic Awareness?” then you know that there are three phases to this game because there are three different skills to be mastered.

PHASE ONE:
First you are going to play the game by focusing on the parts in the words. So you will say “I Spy a pic -(pause) ture”
This is to get your little one to focus on putting syllables together to hear a word.
If you are confident that your little one can hear and combine syllables then move on to phase Two. If not, practice this game a little each day in different locations.

Phase Two:
This time you are going to focus on the initial sound and the rest of the word so you are isolating a sound but you are still including the bigger chunk of the word.
So you are going to say “I spy a /p/ – /en/”

Phase Three:
Finally, you are going to focus on segmenting all the sounds so that your child has to listen carefully to figure out the word.
If your child cannot figure out the first two simple words PLEASE don’t force it, spend some time working on the earlier skills first.
So you will say, “I spy a /p/ – /e/ – /n/”

This entire activity is meant to build your child’s familiarity with sounds in spoken language, but make sure you have fun with it. Give a pep talk “Let’s play I Spy, it is a fun guessing game, but I’m going to be tricky and hide the word I Spy. I wonder if I will stump you.”

February 2, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

More On Compound Words

Now remember, just because my title says “compound words,” doesn’t mean that your little one will know what a compound word is. We are just teaching our children the content at this point….not the vocabulary. We are teaching them age-appropriate oral language skills.

So, that being said, today we are going to give our children more practice playing with words because if you have read some of my other reading posts you know that “playing with words” and other listening activities will help your little one become more and more skilled in hearing and distinguishing that words are made up of sounds.

Today I want you to print the document I have made, cut out the pictures, and first READ all the names of the pictures to your child a few times. Then see if they can tell you the names of the pictures. This is an oral language warm-up.

Now, I want you to show your little one that if you put two pictures together it might make a new word, but that word can be a real word or a silly word. Give them examples and tell them why because you have to model the activity before you ask them to try.

Let your child determine if the new word is real or silly, but be there to support their thinking for the answer -right or wrong. Meaning, praise them if they are right, but if they are wrong always preface your correction with “No, but that was good thinking or a good try.”

You will write their answers on the real/silly recording sheet to model writing the new words 🙂

Picture Combo

January 26, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

Fill in the Rhyme

“Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candle________”

This is the third phase of rhyming: Generating the rhyme that would complete the sentence. However, you and I not only intrinsically rhyme, but we are familiar with this rhyme and if we are not, we could just use our deductive reasoning to figure that the word missing is “stick.”

Little children are trying to learn patterns in familiar rhymes so that they can acquire these skills.

So, first I want you to read your child some nursery rhymes or other rhyming books you may own, and after they are familiar with them, read them again without the second rhyme, giving them a few seconds of “wait time” to guess what rhyme is missing.

Then, I want you to print the following template:

Color The Rhyming Picture

Color The Rhyming Picture Poem

You are going to ask them to generate the rhyme and then color in the picture for the poem, or you can just ask your child to color the picture that rhymes with _______(for example, “fun”-and the answer would be “sun”). My suggestion is to allow your child to name all the images in the picture first so that they will not be so confused when trying to identify the rhyming picture.

January 14, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments

Even More to Learn About Rhyming

There are 3 different rhyming skills:

1) Listening to words and identifying whether or not they rhyme: Do these words rhyme: “cat/rat”? ; Do these words rhyme: “hot/shoe”?

2) Listening to rhyming words and coming up with another one: “mop, stop, ________” (Even if they say a made up word like shlop.)

3) Coming up with a rhyming word for a single word: “Can you think of a word that rhymes with day?”

My earlier rhyming posts are both activities that fall into the first category of the rhyming skills because both activities are made to listen for and identify whether or not the words rhyme.

Once your child can tell you whether or not words rhyme (skill #1), you want to practice activities that will help them to create rhymes.

Click on the link for an activity for skill #2:

Create A Rhyme

January 10, 2011 by Jessica | 0 comments