About a month ago, at 3 years and 7 months, Adrian started to blend sounds together, and since then, it has been a fascinating journey on the road of reading and blending. Today, we are continuing working with Montessori CVC Pink 💗Series. After mastering the "a" sound, the next phonetic sound to introduce to an early "blender" according to Montessori pedagogy is an "e" sound.
Pink Series three-letter phonetic words have the same pattern: CVC = Consonant -Vowel -Consonant. All the words in Pink Series are phonetically decodable, that is all of the letters used retain their phonetic sound that the child recognizes and is used to it.
Ask the child to read words, either written on a piece of paper or presented with a movable alphabet, and once the child blends the three CVC letters together, show a corresponding picture or an object.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/224878513
Once Adrian successfully blends the letters together forming words, Julia would show him a corresponding object to reinforce visual association. (We are using this Montessori Small Movable Alphabet.)
A subset of phonological awareness, phonemic awareness is child's ability to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes, the smallest units of sound. Simply said phonemic awareness is child's ability to segment words into their component sounds. For example, separating the word "hen" into three distinct phonemes, /h/, /e/, and /n/, (that is being able to hear the sounds in the word hen, and not the letter names) requires phonemic awareness. Being a basis for learning phonics, phonemic awareness improves children's word reading and reading comprehension, as well as helps children learn to spell.
Steps towards literacy must be climbed one-by-one, just like when a child is learning how to walk or how to speak. In a Montessori language curriculum, hands-on phonetic approach helps young children to form a clear understanding of how written words encode the spoken sounds into the symbolic letters of the alphabet. Loving and supporting prepared environment and patience are the key in assuring that your child's road to reading is joyful, desirable and satisfactory.
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