One of the strategies that we will use in my program will be phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness deals with segmentations of sounds; it differentiates the facility to manipulate the sounds of oral speech (Calfee, Share and Yopp 1995, 1988). When phonemic awareness is used there is substantiation that students comprehend that a printed symbol represents a sound, a sound represents letters and letters represent words. Subsequently, the reasons stated are that the sounds for any given phoneme can vary considerably from word to word and speaker to speaker, therefore, students will need to be exposed to a variety of sounds in order to acquire phonemic awareness. In the classroom, students will engage in activities to acquire specific skills to reinforce phonemic awareness.
The program will start from simple games and will gradually progress to challenge the students motivating them to excel. One strategy used in the RAP program is a simple game which involves clapping your name into syllables. Students will start clapping their names and their peers’ names to get acquainted and feel at ease as they start to develop phonemic awareness skills. Another strategy that will be used in phonemic awareness is the recording of different sounds (i.e., water running and closing a door), the students are to distinguish and guess the sounds. Once they are acquainted
References: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence –based assessment of the scientific research 4754). Washington, DC: U.S. government Printing Office. Share, D.L., (1995). Phonological recording and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition Yopp, H.K. (1988). The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness tests. Reading Research Quarterly, 23, 159-177.