Strong phonemic awareness skills are so important to reading success. Phonemic awareness can be be both fun and challenging for new or struggling readers. In the Orton Gillingham training program we learned about how to teach phonemic awareness alongside Orton Gillingham skills and strategies. For some students with Dyslexia, the auditory nature of a phonemic awareness skills such as identifying the beginning sounds in words or rhyming, can be welcome break from some of the visual challenges that other reading skills bring. For other students, auditory learning is a particular challenge that takes a lot of focus and hard work. With all of this in mind, I decided that I wanted to find a way to make phonemic awareness skills more fun and exciting.
This is Cookie, a long time favorite stuffed animal friend of my students. Cookie wanted to learn karate, so I got him a karate outfit, complete with belts for all the levels. I matched each phonemic awareness skill with a karate belt color. Each skill has a color coded card deck. Students work through each of the skills to help cookie earn that color belt. It's been such a joy to see how this has transformed phonemic awareness learning for students. They've been so excited to help cookie earn the belts, and gradually that enthusiasm carries over to the phonemic awareness skills too. They feel so proud for each color belt that they help Cookie earn, and over the moon when they get him to the black belt.
I've found that students who have gone through this phonemic awareness series consistently have an easier time sounding out words, noticing similar words, and learning new spelling patterns. What a joy to see their hard work pay off!
And more Cookie adventures to come! One of my students loves learning with Cookie so much that he's now learning ballet as she learns to write words. More on that adventure in a future post!
Comments