Young Owls
Helping children from 2 years onwards
to listen carefully
and discriminate sounds
Pre-reading skills
We talk all the time to our children from birth but can we make this into 'Smart' talking so that they learn better to listen more carefully.
Children love books at this age and are very curious about the reading process. They have to become excellent at listening carefully so that they can discriminate the different sounds.
Listening accurately is a vital skill to master before children can translate the different oral sounds (phonemes) into the written letters (graphemes). If they can hear the 3 different sounds for example in a word such as c-a-t then they are well equipped to blend these and read the word when they learn what letters make what sounds (course 2). However if they cannot yet hear these different sounds then this tricky process will become even more challenging.
About My 1st Course
This course will explain how you can teach different aspects of listening to tune into sounds, to talk about them and to widen their vocabulary describing what they can hear. I will show you ways to make this fun and how you can use experiences, such as going to the beach, become a listening fun activity without it being planned for or feel contrived.
You will become great at finding opportunities to drip-feed learning about listening more carefully into daily life, whether it is baking or bath time. You will also have examples of games you can play to help with tuning in and discriminating sounds.
If children become good at this then turning the sounds they can hear into letters (as in the second course) will be much easier for them to do.
I have adapted how many teachers would teach sound discrimination in England to what you can do at home.