I recently asked Melissa Caudle to help me better understand the terms phonemic awareness and phonological awareness, specifically as they relate to Rock ‘N Learn Letter Sounds and Phonics DVDs. Melissa is my sister-in-law and also chief script writer at Rock ‘N Learn. She’s a former elementary education teacher who taught second graders and also worked in remedial reading. Here’s what she told me:
Phonics is a method of teaching beginners to read by showing them the relationship between letters and their sounds. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and tell the differences between words, sounds, and syllables. When developing phonemic awareness, learners come to understand the relationships between sounds. They also learn to alter or rearrange sounds to create new words.
By using both auditory and visual components, Rock ‘N Learn phonics DVDs are highly effective at helping students develop phonemic and phonological awareness. Students listen to sounds and make important letter-sound associations. The programs move from simple to complex and give ample practice with each skill as the lessons progress.
Rock ‘N Learn’s recently revised phonics DVDs specifically address these elements of phonemic and phonological awareness:
Phonemic identity: Learners identify a common sound in different words.
Phoneme isolation and oral segmenting: Students recognize individual sounds and practice dividing words into their separate sounds.
Blending: Individual sounds are blended together to form words.
Rhyme: Learners work with rhyming words. This method is sometimes called word families in phonetic instruction.
Hearing syllables: Multisyllabic words are broken down into their parts.
It’s easy to get educational terms confused, and often it can seem like a lot of jargon. Nevertheless, educators may need to document how specific elements are addressed. Hope this helps in understanding how Rock ‘N Learn addresses phonemic and phonological awareness.
Anything you want to add? Feel free to post a comment!
Beuatiful designs thanks for sharing ; )