Module 3: Activity 2

I think teaching phonological awareness is very important in developing reading skills. In my pre-k class, the students can often name the first, middle, and last letter sound in a CVC, like sat, but they have trouble putting all the sounds together and making it form the word. I think using made up words for instruction depends on what you are teaching. For example, one skill in phonological awareness is rhyming. Lots of rhyming games have to deal with children’s names like the “Banana Song” or the “Name Game” (Katie, Katie, bo-batie; Banana-fana fo-fatie; Fee-Fi-mo-matie; Katie!) Which is all silly and made up words. If we didn’t make up words for rhyming names, many children would be left out of the song. When I start teaching the class about word families, like the -at family, I will have –at displayed and we will add different letters in front of it to make real words. A student will later come to me and say “look, I made zat” and show me the word zat he wrote in a notebook. You cannot say he didn’t read and write the word zat just because it’s not a real word. During instruction on word families we talk about make believe words versus real words. I focus on teaching real words and I always show pictures of "real" words that we are making. When students are interacting they will name a letter for the word family that doesn’t make a real word, I tell them I don’t have a picture of this word because it’s make believe. Sometimes it is hard for students at this age to discriminate real words versus pretend because their vocabulary is so limited.