Letters And Sounds...

[Guest]

hiya everyone...

 

okay, so, i use letters and sounds with my nursery class, one session each day (15-20 mins) at the moment we are learning about rythmn and rhyme aaaand its not as easy as first thought, haha.

 

im just wondering if i should stay on this aspect until they understand the concept of rhyme or move on and revisit this aspect at a later date?

 

obviously throughout our day we sing nursery rhymes, read rhyming stories, try and encourage silly rhyming names for each other, etc. so im just wondering if its best to move onto the next aspect before the children get too bored of playing games like silly soup that, in all honesty they still arent really understanding as to why they should be stiring random words in a bowl ,hehe.

 

thanks for any advice

Edited November 25, 2009 by Guest

[katekit]

In my opinion I would leave it for a while, but continue to play games, drop rhymes into conversations, read lots of lovely books (mine are really enjoying The Gruffalo at the moment) and then try again in a bit. There always seems to be a danger that things will be learnt by 'rote' instead of being natural osmosis. At the moment we are doing body sounds but seem to be doing rhyme as well. Hope that makes some sense!

[Guest]

We do daily inital sound stuff with kids names - choosing helpers etc and still have an inital sound focus on display etc as in the old days!! We also regularly read books, rhyming books etc and things come out incidentally from this. However with Linking Sounds and Letters we only do one formal activity a week unless one happens to coincide nicely with a music lesson. We tend to do all the listening activities in the first term, initial sound in the second term and the rhyming alliteration and segmenting I only do formally in the few weeks before they hit Reception. We concentrate about 4/5 activities on rhyming as this is certainly more fun than the segmenting and just about all we get in before the Christmas madness takes over! We also have a set of rhyming objects that we use for all the games so even if they have not fully got the concept of rhyme they at least know a few in response to the word 'rhyme' as they remember the objects and the photos of objects that we use over and over again each week. In this way I find that about 50% of the group will begin to take it in. Hope that makes sense!

[Guest]

In training recently we were told that we shouldn't get too hung up about the concept of rhyme within phase 1. It's a hard one to grasp and some children won't get it until they are much older, and yet it will not of course affect their ability to read and write in the slightest! Some of my brightest in year 1 still don't get it fully, yet can read and write at a year 2 and beyond level.

 

I would definitely leave it, obviously keep emphasising it whenever you come across it and revisiting it, but don't let it stop you moving on within phase one, or indeed moving on to phase two when the children are confident with all other aspects of phase one.

[Guest]

thanks guys!

 

yeah, I think I will just move on with phase one. my older children are more or less ready for phase two but due to staffing and me trying to fit everything in to our time table im keeping them on phase 1 until christmas. I'm also scared of moving them on too fast, they are only nursery after all, so I think waiting until the second term will be okay.

 

my children looove The Gruffalo, not as much as we're going on a The Bear Hunt though! we read it weeeeks ago but you still find groups of them in our 'forest' outside playing bear hunt, copying all the actions and sounds that are in the book, hehe.

 

thanks again for your help