2.3

Sources further information; developing &/or collecting resources for literacy & numerical teaching & learning.

Tags: Phonics, numeracy, literacy, language, visual phonics, spelling, addition, subtraction, large numbers.

Rational

I recently found this delightful set of alphabet cards and wanted to find an educational way of using this resource to teach young children.  I came up with the idea of creating my own visual phonics program, which is often used to provide print awareness for children who have hearing loss or experience difficulty in developing phonological awareness.  Phonics is able to teach young children alphabet knowledge, sound-letter correspondence and print awareness (Woolsey, Satterfield and Roberson, 2006).

Sadly the alphabet letters are all in capital letters, which is unfortunate because young children need to be able to write and understand both capital and lower case letters.  I have therefore decided to make my own Animal Phonic resource by using the capital letters.  I have then inserted the lower case letter as well, as the name of the animal in both upper case and lower case.  This way children are able to recognise both upper and lower case letters, and sing along with the adult for example B is for Butterfly, child would say B…B…B... adult would say Butterfly child would say b…b…b… butterfly.  This way the child would also be hearing the sounds of the letters both uppercase and lower case and will over time learn that letters can make different sounds too.  The letters also provide young children with a tactile feel of touch.

This set of letters are delightful children should be encouraged to trace around the letters, practice writing the letters and making simple words for example cat, bird, seal, whale, mouse, house etc.  By purchasing another set of letters more complex words could then be made for example days of the week, months or seasons and children could also have a go at spelling their own name.  The alphabet letters is a great resource to have at home, where children could work with parents or caregivers as well as at preschool, kindergarten or childcare where they have the potential to work with educators and educators could work with small groups of children, teaching them phonics.

The animal alphabet also comes with a hard cover book, providing there are sufficient sets of letters and using my edition of the Jolly Phonics principles, children could spell out the names of the animals in the book by copying the words from my edition using capital letters.

In addition I have also found this delightful set of numbers, perfect for young children aged between birth – four years old.  Again the numbers have a tactile feel and come with a storybook, that helps children count from 1 – 20.  The book is hard cover with board pages perfect for young children.  As the child grows up the set of numbers will become helpful in helping children to recognise numerals, draw and trace numerals.  The numerals can also be used to solve simple addition mathematical problems for example 3 + 7 = 10 or simple subtraction problems such as 9 – 7 = 2.  Young children could classify these numbers into colour groups, ascending or descending order.  As the child grows older parents or educators could use the numerals to teach children about odd and even numbers.

Unfortunately the set of numbers does not have a stand alone 0.  This is important as children could make large numbers such as 100 or 70.  However this problem could be overcome by using the letter O out of the alphabet set.

REFERENCES

Krutop, L., (2013). Animal Alphabet Australia, South Melbourne: Alicat Publishing

Krutop, L., (2013). Animal Counting Australia, South Melbourne: Alicat Publishing

Woolsey, M.L., Satterfield, S.T. and Robertson, L., 2006. Visual phonics: An english code buster? in American Annals of the Deaf, 151(4), pp. 452-7.