A 2-year-old Develops Phonemic Awareness
One of the early key indicators of the ease and success with which a child will learn to read is Phonemic Awareness, the ability to hear, identify and manipulate the individual sounds within words.
2-year-old loves phonemic awareness and mud
My three youngest grandchildren are 6, 4 and 2 years old. The 6-year-old has found learning to read very difficult and has been using my program, Gilead Success with Phonics, to help. The younger two have “had to have a turn too”. The 4-year-old has taught himself to read, and the 2-year-old (2 years 5months) has taught himself to speak incredibly clearly. When you are the youngest of eight children, you have to assert yourself so that you don’t miss out. Incidentally, these children spend much of their time outdoors, playing in mud, building cubbies, growing food in their own gardens … generally growing up in an old fashioned country life style – see the photo above of the 2-year-old helping to build their new wood-fired, cob pizza oven.
When the 2-year-old was visiting a couple of weeks ago, he went through 20 or so pages, clicking the “loudspeaker symbol” and delighting in repeating the sequence of individual sounds. He did this totally unaided with no direction, encouragement or input from either an adult or older brother. Unfortunately, I didn’t go and find the camera then. A couple of days ago, he only did this once. The rest of the time he just clicked to hear the sequence of sounds, then the word, and then only repeated the word aloud. He no longer needed to say the individual sounds first to be able to say the whole word very clearly emphasising the individual sounds. He is a child who now already has a good grasp on Phonemic Awareness, and I predict he will learn to read with ease.
About half way through the video, the voice saying “/b/ /a/ /m/ bam” the first time is his 4-year-old brother in the background. Sometimes older brothers just have to “contribute” because they are faster to work something out.
Another grandson had hearing and speech difficulties. He also later struggled with learning to read. He had a couple of sessions with a speech.pathologist when he was 5, but unfortunately could not get ongoing free sessions because he was going to be home schooled. The speech.pathologist gave my daughter-in-law games that she could play with him to help him hear and say the sounds within words. These games seemed to her to be very similar to what I was developing to help children with reading difficulties (including an early version of the computer program above), so she used that and they found it very helpful.
So, whatever a child’s difficulties, or lack of difficulties, developing Phonemic Awareness is a critical, key step in learning to read successfully.
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