Activities To Try at Home

Phonological Awareness Activities:

Phonological Awareness activities are those that help children hear, recognize, and manipulate the sounds in spoken language. These skills include a child's ability to:

• Identify words that rhyme

• Count the number of syllables in a word

• Recognize alliterations (words that have the same beginning sound, e.g. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers)

• Phonemic Awareness (blend individual sounds to make words, stretch out words into individual sounds, and swap the sounds in words to make a new word)

Rhyming: 

Try playing the following game with your child to help promote understanding of rhyming word.

"I am thinking of an animal that rhymes with big.  What is the the animal?" 

Answer: pig

What are some other words that rhyme with big? (dig, wig, fig)

The following are a few more activities from the Florida Center for Reading Research that you can do at home with your child.

Recognizing Syllables in Words:

While at the grocery store, have your child tell you the syllables in different food names.  Have them hold up a finger for each word part. e.g. Pineapple - Pine-ap-ple, Pineapple has 3 syllables

The following are a few more activities from the Florida Center for Reading Research that you can do at home with your child.

Alliteration:

Alliteration, where the sound you aare focused on is repeated over and over again, can be a fun way to provide practice with a specific speech sound.  Try practicing these with your child:

• For /m/: Miss Mary makes marvelous meatballs!

• For /s/: Silly Sam sings songs about socks and shoes.

• For /f/: Francis finds fireflies with a friend.

Below are addition activities from the Florida Center for Reading Research for you to practice alliteration with your child at home.

Phonemic Awareness:

Phonemic Awareness encompasses many skills. By the end of  1st grade, students should be able to recognize the individual sounds of each phoneme, blend them to make words, and manipulate the sounds of words to form new words.  The following are some suggested activities that you can do with your child at home to promote growth in phonemic awareness:

• "I Spy" beginning sound game: Play a game of "I Spy" at home, on a walk, or at the grocery store.  Choose words with easy-to-hear beginning sounds.  For example, you might say, "I spy something yellow that starts with the /b/ sound (banana)."

• Sound Scavenger Hunt: Chose a letter sound and then have your child find things around the house that starts with the same sound.  For example, "Can you find something in our house that starts with the /d/ sound?" door, desk, dog

• "I Spy" Blending: While taking a walk or at home, play "I Spy" using the sounds of words that you might see.  For example, you may say "I spy a /d/ /o/ /g/. Can you help me figure out what it is?" Your child will blend the sounds to make the word dog.

• Sound Counting: Using Lego bricks, blocks, beads, pennies, or scraps of paper, say a word and have your child show you how many sounds the word makes.  They will move one item for every sound they make.  For example, say bat. Bat has three sounds /b/-/a/-/t/. You child would use three items to represent these sounds. Have then tap each object as they say a sound.  Remember, your child is only counting the sounds, not the letters in a word.  For example, the word bike only has three sounds because the i_e combo makes 1 sounds (long e).

Additional activities from the Florida Center for Reading Research can be found below:

Phonics Activities:

Phonics is the ability to match the phoneme to the corresponding grapheme, or sound to letter.  

The following are a few things that you can do at home to support your child's learning of their phonemes and graphemes:

• At a minimum, your first grader will learn how to sound out the following letter blends this year: st-, sm-, sn-, -st, -lp, sl, cr, cl, tr, dr, nt, nd, mp, nk.  Write out a single letter blend on an index card or pice of paper. Have your child say the sound of the blend and then ask them to name a few common objects that have that sound.

• Explain to your child that sometimes, two letters are used to create a new sound. The "H" brothers join with other letters to make these sounds: /sh/, /ch/, /th/, and /wh/.  Write down some example words and use multisensory props and gestures to help your child remember the new letter combinations. Here's a fun idea for telling the story of the H Brothers.

Additional activities from the Florida Center for Reading Research can be used to help build your child's phonics skills:

Vocabulary Activities:

Children with larger vocabularies understand more of what they read and hear.  You can help your child develop a greater vocabulary by reading with them at home.  Here are a few other ideas of ways you can help your child develop a larger vocabulary:

• Word Collecting - Have your child(ren) collect interesting words that they have heard throughout the day.  At the dinner table, have everyone share their words and what they think they mean.  If your child shares an incorrect meaning, guide him/her to the correct meaning. Then try to use some of these interesting words in upcoming conversations with your child.

• Use the language of books such as title, author, illustrator, page number, etc. when reading with your child.

• While reading, asks your child to use the word clues in the sentence to help them figure out the meaning of difficult words.

• Encourage your child to use synonyms (words the mean the same thing) to describe every day events. For example, when you ask your child how their day was and they say "good", encourage them to use another word besides good, such as great or wonderful.

Below are addition activities from the Florida Center for Reading Research that can be used at home to help build your child's vocabulary skills.

Comprehension Activities:

Your first grader is quickly learning to become an independent reader and retell familiar stories and events from books they read.  Here are a few ideas of ways you can help your child with their reading comprehension:

• Try to read at home together every day.  While your first grader may be reading independently, reading aloud introduces your learner to more complex texts and greater vocabulary.

• Connect stories that you are reading at home with real life events that take place around you. For example, when walking through a park or driving down the road and you see a construction site, connect it to stories about big machines, such as bulldozer or dump trucks, that you have read together.

• While reading, ask your child to make predictions about the story.  Look at the cover and the title of the book and ask, "What do you think this book might be about? Why do you think that?"

• After reading a story together, have your child tell you five things about the story, using their fingers to talk about each one. (1) Who were the characters in the story? (2) What was the setting (where did it take place)? (3) What events happened in the story? (4) How did the story end? (5) what was your favorite part of the story and why?

Here are a few other activities from the Florida Center for Reading Research that you can do at home to help your child with their reading comprehension:

"My Child Can" Booklet from ALSDE

The Alabama Department of Education has released a series of "My Child Can" booklets for each grade level. Inside each booklet, you can find an overview of skills that your child should master by the end of the year.  Included within are also several activities and resources for you to use with your child at home.