In September our four-year-old classes will be introduced to the Fun Family Phonics Program. All teachers at Creative Kids have taken the four-week course and have their tutoring certificate on teaching the program. We are very excited about this program and know that each child will benefit greatly. Our goals at Creative Kids Learning Centres have always been PLANTING THE SEED FOR FURTHER EDUCATION and we strive to always find ways to extend our great program to benefit the children even more. Please keep in mind that this program is a fun, interactive, stimulating program that the children find very enjoyable.
The Fun Family Phonics Program has been implemented in only a very small handful of preschools and the teachers and parents have found their students to be very successful and confident as they learn the concepts, shapes and sounds of the alphabet and beyond.
What is Phonics? Phonics is a way of teaching reading and spelling through letter-sounding relationships. Letters are abstract symbols. Children have difficulty puzzling them out and distinguishing between them, as long as they remain abstract. This unique method of teaching early phonic skills was invented to give life to these symbols and to provide a memory hook between the symbol and the sound that the letter makes in a word. The stories in the Fun Family Phonics Program (1st book) center on the lower case letters because these are the ones that children find most difficult. Upper case letters are included in the text and each story begins with the capitalized form of the target letter. Please keep in mind that this entire program is based on fun, implementing, songs, games, creative stories and is very age appropriate.
An important aspect of children's literacy development is learning about the purposes of reading and writing and how the written language works. This knowledge is widely known as "print awareness" (concepts of print and language awareness). A good grasp on print awareness is necessary before children move onto phonic skills. All these skills are built in to our program over the two years your child shares with us.
Print awareness includes a number of concepts, such as:
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Functions, or uses, of writing and reading.
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Visual features - what print looks like.
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Language structures - such as the way stories begin and end.
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Procedures - such as the left to right direction of writing and spacing between words.
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The symbolic nature of writing - that writing can represent spoken words and ideas.
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The alphabetic principle - that there is a relationship between printed letters and speech sounds.
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Phonological awareness - awareness of sound elements in language, such as rhyme, beginning sounds, syllables, and phonemes (the smallest unit of sound in speech).
When working with your child at home, it is very helpful to please encourage them to write using "lower case letters" and "upper case letters" only at the beginning of their name or a sentence. Also, when writing with your child, start "left to right", starting at the top left hand corner of the page. This concept will help your child as they start to learn to read. Reading to your child daily and incorporating open-ended questions will also benefit them greatly at this age as they are learning print awareness.
You will see this program progress throughout the year. If you have any questions, please ask.
See our Fun Family Phonics Order Form
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