 Phonological awareness is about the sounds of language. In grade one we talk a lot about teaching phonics and when we teach phonics we're actually connecting the letters to the sounds and using our pencils and writing it down. But before that can happen, first the students have to be able to hear the sounds. Discover! Dis... Now that's a bit of a bigger word. I think I want to stretch it out. Should we pull it down and stretch it out? Dis... Let's do it by syllables. Let's just do dis first. Da...is... So when we're developing phonological awareness we are playing with the sounds of language and we're just trying to hear them before we start adding the letter symbols to the sounds. Let's your fingers snap snap snap Let's your arms go up and down Let's your fingers make the single sound. The transition for many students from kindergarten into grade one can be very difficult and this year I've thought a lot about how can I help them transition from those really rich play experiences that they have in kindergarten and now into grade one we expect them to be able to sit in a guided reading group we expect them to sit at a table and be able to take pencil to paper and so how do I help them with that? And I've been realizing this year that by developing their phonological awareness I can take the prior experience that they've had in kindergarten and use that to help transition them into grade one. So in kindergarten they would have had a lot of rich literature read to them they would have had songs and poems and storytelling and playing with puppets lots of conversations during central time so all I need to do at the beginning of grade one is continue that work on. Left, right, tie them up tight. I want my students to be able to really listen to the music of the language to enjoy the stories, to hear the rhythm and the rhyme and then try to take it a step further and try to break the language down for them. First word, house. Get your arm ready. Let's tap it out. Decorator E. What's the first sound? H. H, pull your H out. So at the beginning of the year when we're starting to write a message in our agenda book we listen to how many words are in the agenda message. We will clap the number of words. I have it up on the smart board so there's that visual component too and as we're clapping the number of words I'll also tap the smart board and it puts a little box around each word so that we can listen and we can look and see how many words are in each sentence. Then we try to break it down even further. So we might look at the syllables in a word and all teachers have their ways of looking at how many syllables but because we clap the number of words in a sentence we use our arms to tap the syllables so say for instance if the word is hippopotamus we'll start with all the syllables so we might do hippopotamus and then we'll start by looking at the first syllable, hip and we'll try to listen for the sounds and we'll try to distinguish between the beginning and the middle and the end sound so we always grab the first sound glide the middle vowel sounds and chop off the end so for hip it would sound like hip So we have the first and the last sound we're listening for that middle sound duh, ow, no so we need those two letters to say ow ow If we're doing something in science and we're taking notes then we take our time to discuss new vocabulary words lately we've been learning about plants so if they have a new word like stem or roots we sound out those words and then we write down the sounds that we hear together in our notes so students know how to count them on their fingers st, m and write down the four sounds that they hear to spell that new word and then we talk about the meaning and the context of our science learning no matter what subject you're teaching in grade one you are always a language arts teacher first and foremost so it progresses from knowing the sounds and being able to write them and then being able to put them together as a word and then eventually put them together as a sentence what am I hearing next and in reading, once they know the sounds again they're able to use their knowledge to help sound out words that they might not always see in their reading I've found that students need that solid, solid phonological awareness base before they can even attack phonics it's not meaningful to them what is a B if you don't know what sound it makes and that you can produce that sound and teaching that I think is key to grade one's development and success as readers and writers it also really helps with their I think their oral language skills in that they can hear sounds they can produce sounds so just really focusing in on sounds and their importance