MA Standards:
Foundational Skills/RF.PK.MA.2.c: Identify the initial sound of a spoken word and, with guidance and support, generate several other words that have the same initial sound
Head Start Outcomes:
Language Development/Receptive Language: Attends to language during conversations, songs, stories, or other learning experiences.
Literacy Knowledge/Phonological Awareness: Identifies and discriminates between sounds and phonemes in language, such as attention to beginning and ending sounds of words and recognition that different words begin or end with the same sound.
PreK Learning Guidelines:
English Language Arts/Reading and Literature 8: Listen to, identify, and manipulate language sounds to develop auditory discrimination and phonemic awareness.
Word Play: Tell Me What You Hear (short /a/)
© Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Early Education and Care (Jennifer Waddell photographer). All rights reserved.
ELA Focus Skills: Phonological Awareness (Beginning Sounds), Vocabulary
Tell children they are going to review the short /a/ sound. Tell them you want them to recite a poem with you that has different words that begin with the letter sound /a/. Recite the poem once and repeat as children join in.
Tell Me What You Hear
Recite this chant with words that begin with the target sound.
Listen, listen, loud and clear (cup your hands to one ear)
What’s the first sound that you hear?
Apple, action, after, add! (emphasize the /a/ sound)
Tell me, tell me, what you hear! (children say the /a/ sound)
Source for chant: Mississippi Early Learning Guidelines for Four-Year Old Children, Mississippi Department of Education, 2006.
Take It Further: You may want to have children suggest other words that start with the letter sound short /a/ and recite the poem again.