...helping children discriminate between sounds
All children within the class will be working on developing similar skills. Differentiation of the curriculum should take into account:
- the amount of time that is needed to effect success for the individual child
- whether the environment facilitates the good attention and listening required for these kind of activities
- whether teaching needs to be more or less explicit.
Children need to move from an understanding of syllables that relies on their clapping their hands or on saying a word out loud, towards their making an internalised judgment about the number of syllables in a word.
Similarly, many children will initially need to name pictures or objects aloud, before deciding whether the words rhyme or not. This is a normal part of development.
Group/individual focus
Some children need more focused practice in order to learn to identify rhymes and syllables.
They may also need to be taught to discriminate between different phonemes and how they can be blended or strung together in words.
Specific attention might be paid to initial and/or final sounds.
Other children may have a specific difficulty in the area of speech sounds and might need more individual attention to develop their auditory listening and discimination.
Classroom management
Many children will come to school with an ability to rhyme and with a good sense of rhythm. Rhyming games are part of life in Key Stage 1 and will reinforce this inner knowledge shared by most children.
The Word Level work in the literacy hour continues this learning and it is expected that phonological skills will quicky be acquired.
These skills are commonly reinforced by activities such as:
- whole class participation in (nursery) rhymes, songs
- sharing books with strong rhyming patterns
- stressing rhyming words in a song or poem
- anticipation of rhyme: asking children to complete rhyming couplets
- playing with syllables -marking musical beats, clapping names