Tag Archives: phonics

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Washing My Souns

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Intentional play is the best way to learn. Email from a Souns mom:

We decided to wash the Souns with shaving cream and my daughter loved it.  I started off by sitting with her putting the shaving cream on a rubbermaid container top.  We both spent time drawing Souns in the shaving cream then I left her alone to play.  

She was quite fascinated with the shaving cream and she spent tons of time cleaning then organizing the Souns on the side of the tub.

I had to take some pictures of this wonderful experience!!  Thought you would like to see some. The pictures are in order to see the start and finish of her project.

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Building Words With Soun(d)s

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jenpcv10-13
A Peace Corps volunteer in South Africa shares her work with the Souns program funded by The Rotary Foundation. What an amazing collaboration between two globally sensitive, benevolent-minded organizations. Thank you Rotary Districts 6900 and 9400!
I had such a great day with the children today that I thought I should share.  I made some “picture cards” earlier this week to help teach new English vocabulary to the children through pictures. 
 
I showed them the pictures, gave them the meanings in Xitsonga and English, and we started to figure out how to build them.  At first the children had no clue what I wanted when I asked “What sound does ‘pot’ start with?”  But after getting a translation, a little boy  whispered “pih pih pih”.  We soon had pot built, and the children took turns saying “pih ah tih” several times.  A few even started saying “pot”.  It was amazing to see the kids take their first step in writing and reading.  I could see the educators who were watching finally get what I was trying to do with the programme, and they began to get excited and more involved with the groups.  They were seeing 3-4 year old children figure out how to write words and read.  
 
I look forward to teaching them a few new words and sounds each day.  

Second day: We work together to sound out the word, and the children are eager to grab the Souns and build the word.  Today we focused on “hat”, “mop” and “pot”.  Right now, the kids are still struggling to separate the individual sounds in the words, but little by little they are getting there.

Some of them are even starting to read the words we build.

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Giggles, Letter-Sounds, Results!

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It was such a treat to train preschools in Longview, Texas, today. The bright-minded teachers and the eager children made the experience exceptional.  We trained teachers for 12 classrooms and enjoyed the assistance of a few little ones to demonstrate the fun one can have learning letter-sounds.

Longview10-13Large smiles from those teachers and giggles from their little people painted a promising picture for early literacy in this community. Four children of different preschool ages and abilities played with Souns as teachers were trained to implement the program. Amazingly, play is the teacher. When learning is fun, the timing is right, and the hands are involved, school looks very different to a child.

And it works! One public preshcool in Longview began implementing Souns in eleven preschool classrooms this year in September. Today they ordered materials for three more classrooms. Results are clear – Souns is making a difference. Consider this letter that greeted me in an email today from a preschool using Souns in Colorado. It is from parents celebrating the reading ability of their Souns child who graduated from the preschool and is currently in kindergarten. We are grateful for such sharing.

I was told that you called the other day to follow up on the [Souns] reading program you did this past year.  I longview10-13-5wanted to send you the picture of [my daughter] as September’s super reader for her Kindergarten class.  I gave her teacher the letter you had given in regards to the Souns program.  She is reading now and just the other day read 5 books in a 15 minute period. When we do spelling words with our older son, our daughter is able to spell many of them just because she knows what sound the letter makes!   Thank you so much!!  The only downside is that she said she hasn’t learned anything new in Kindergarten yet!!  I suppose that is a problem that can easily be fixed!!

Build her library and stand back. A reader will always be learning. Once a child can read, you can’t take that away!

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She Found An /e/!

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Paisley’s Mom Shares!

Recently, Souns are Paisley’s favorite thing to play with.  At least a couple times every day she goes to where we have them sitting with her toys in her room and she gets the bag and brings them over to me and starts pulling them out.  Sometimes she identifies them as she is pulling them out, sometimes she just wants to look at them, and sometimes she looks for a specific one (usually p).  She especially likes them at night or in the morning.  A couple days ago she told me “Book.  Read.”  And I said, “Sure, Paisley, let’s put your diaper on and then you can go pick a book and we can read whichever one you want.”  She got excited about that and exclaimed “Read!  Cool!”  So we finished putting her diaper on and she went over to her books…and without even looking through the books to choose one she immediately grabbed the bag of Souns and brought it back over to me.  That surprised me.  I don’t know whether she had them in mind all along or whether she saw them next to her books and changed her mind when she went for a book.

I think one reason she especially likes to play with the Souns is because of an activity we sometimes do with them and the bag.  A while ago I started doing something where at night, if we hadn’t used the Souns during the day, I would pick them up (before we were using the bag, when they were just out) and we would say goodnight to them as we put them away back on her shelf.  And that was it.  If she was interested in the activity, I included her, and if she wasn’t interested I just quickly did it myself so that she saw one association for each sound/letter pair for that day, in 10 or 15 seconds.  It was a quick activity.

Now that we are using the bag to contain her Souns, the activity is more fun for her because there is the fun put-things-in-pull-them-out element. We dump all of the Souns out on the bed.  I orient them properly so that she can see them and they are facing the correct way, and then in a random order I ask her to put them back in the bag, and we say goodbye (or good night) to each of them.  “Paisley, will you put the /s/ in the bag?  Bye, /s/, we’ll see you next time!  Look, the /s/ is ssstuck on the edge of the bag.  /s/ likes to get ssstuck when you put him back in the bag!  Can you put the /t/ in the bag?  Bye, /t/, we’ll see you soon!” etc.  She loves that game.  

Paisley often notices letters that she knows on things.  She didn’t sleep much on a recent flight so she had a little burst of energy and was walking around [the airport] while we waited for our luggage. Then she started saying “e” “e” “e” so I pulled out the camera to ask her about it.  (The end is a little dramatic, but don’t worry, she was actually fine, no tears or bumps.)She even started waving to it! 
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Observe! Your Child Is Your Teacher.

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With the best of intentions, our timing and our direction are off! We are missing the most sensitive period in a child’s life to teach the fundamental tools of writing and reading if we do not engage between 0-5 with letter-sound associations. Lower-case letters and the most common sound for each letter is the simplest tool box leading to literacy.

Letter sounds taught kinesthetically with clay, cookie dough, or Souns, using only lower-case letters is so simple and logical. Engaged hands feed developing brains, say the directions that come with this little package called “child.”  Watch a child play, touch, manipulate, explore…all words reflecting engagement with the world. Digging, stacking, building, lifting, carrying – these are the efforts and endless work of the child acclimating to the world around him or her. As adults, we are so driven to teach; yet, if we paused and observed, we would understand ourselves to be the learners. Children know more about how they learn best than we do; but, too often we are not watching.

Today, at our Souns early literacy workshop, we took the time to watch. The images show you what we saw: stacking, matching, lining up, sorting – all the while learning letter sounds. Why not? They learn shoe much before they can put one on. They learn bath, well before they can run their own. Similarly, they can learn /o/m/s/t/ and on through the letter sounds of our alphabet. They are just objects being labeled, the same as a cup or a triangle. If we can keep it simple, they will learn. Look at those little hands and the activity we observed this morning. Enjoy your child. Observe and learn.

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Perhaps We Have It All Backwards

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     A preschooler building a word by listening to the sounds in it.

This past week I was surrounded by incredible people – parents, teachers, administrators, and friends – all grappling with the huge need to better prepare preschool children for success in school. One administrator’s comment, “Our kids are well prepared for kindergarten, except they do not know their letter-sounds!” gives critical direction for the litter-strewn path to reading and writing. Our culture insists on prioritizing the 26 letter names, of which only 5 are used for reading and writing. On the other hand, all 26 letter- sound associations are directly linked to reading and writing. Why do we have it backwards?

Monsters – marketing, fear of failing our children, crippling schedules, and rigid curriculum – invade every discussion, home, and classroom. The front line of education, reading and writing, has been engulfed in a dense, blinding, consuming fog. We can’t see the hand in front of us! We can only hear the shouting voices from every direction. Which do we follow?  Which voices are serving our children?  Which are serving political or financial agendas? The child waits, holding on with complete faith as we scramble to find our footing for the next step.

Such a cacophony can “blind” us to the obvious?  Perhaps we should not be leading the child! Perhaps the child should be leading us! Children are the experts about how they learn best. Research confirms how rapidly the brain is developing between 0-5 years of age. The young child is uniquely programmed for language learning, and, if introduced incrementally, reading and writing fits comfortably and naturally along side language learning. In education design, preschool, not kindergarten, is the time for learning to read and write. That is not the case now. It seems we may have that backwards, too?

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The Souns Path to Reading = FUN!

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This is a Souns child who is 3 years and 3 months. She has arrived at this point in reading incidentally, without pressure or any formal “schooling.” Her Souns experience began as a toddler and unfolded as naturally as learning to eat or dress.

The joy is clearly there, having been protected by a gentle incremental approach to letter-sounds without the presence of letter-names. Letter-names will be a focus later, when she is 4-5 years of age. Consider her reading at the magical 3rd grade level and think of the world of children we are missing. The right information at the right time and in the right way makes a profound difference.

Her father said she cried when they asked her to stop! Motivation is not a problem if the timing is right.

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A Bowl Of Souns

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sounsclasses2boys

A typical moment in the Souns Early Learning Workshops! One mom wrote her story:

“My daughter was born on August 2011. She  was introduced to Souns at our library through a project of the local Rotary Club. We attended on 2 occasions; on January 2013 and March 2013.  Specifically, we [were intoduced to] the Souns letter  /o/.  Since we did not own a set of Souns, I used one of her toys shaped like an o to reference the /o/ sound.  

 
At the end of March 2013, my child pointed to an /o/ on her placemat at dinner and exclaimed, ” Ah!”
 

[Our family] started the every other Friday Souns Early Literacy Workshops at Counterpane Montessori school on August 2013 where our [daugter] was introduced to m, s and t.  My mother and her husband purchased a set of Souns for my daughter on that day.  Within a few weeks, my 2 year old daughter brought me her bowl of Souns.  She held up her m, o, s and t and said,” mm, ah, ss, and tih!”  We celebrated and she was introduced to /p/ and /e/.”  

Playing to learn works! The video below is where the little one in the story above will likely be in a year. She is 3 years 2 months in this video. Importantly, there has been NO pressure to “learn to read” or “school” to compromise the joy of learning through play.

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From The Field In South Africa

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An email from a Peace Corps volunteer in South Africa. These humanitarian minded people are leading us into tomorrow. I am so honored to be working with them in this Rotary /Peace Corps collaborative literacy project.

Hello Brenda,

 
I have started the Souns programme with our village children.  Right now I’m focusing on the three-four year old classroom, and about 40 children have started the programme.  They are brilliant children!  I expected it to take a few sessions for them to really understand what I was doing, and to start relating sounds to the letters, but within the first 15 minute session, the children were starting to associate “ah” with the o’s and “mm” with the m’s.  It’s really encouraging, and the staff members are excited about the programme.  Considering the language barrier (the children can greet in English, but that’s it), I’m amazed at how easily the children are adapting to Souns.  I speak entirely in English, and hardly anything has been translated into Xitsonga after the first lesson or two.
 
Hope all is well with you!
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A Jewel In Colorado!

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dellavisit13

This lovely woman, Della Palacios, is now living in Boulder, Colorado. One of her offerings is Souns and Rhymes classes for little people. Get to know this remarkable talent. I celebrate that she is a Souns trainer as well!

Souns and Rhymes

The design of this class is to establish a foundation so firm that no holes will ever appear in fundamental literacy skills. It’s a simple brilliance that makes it so profound.  Souns® and Rhymes classes consist of two core elements: letter sounds and nursery rhymes.  Parents interact with children as language and literacy is brought to life.

I used Souns with my children and taught them nursery rhymes, but it was not until they were three and four years old.  Now, I am having the pleasure of watching one-year old babes learn nursery rhymes and letter sounds.  Two weeks ago, a 16 month-old said “row row row” in eager anticipation of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”  Another 17-month old pointed out the “mmm” when asked on the poster displaying the rhyme “mary had a little lamb.”  She connected the label of the Souns symbol, /mmm/, to the print on the poster.
 
Simple is best.  Teach children nursery rhymes.  Teach children letter sounds with lower case letters first.  Children will read.