WEBVTT 00:00:10.596 --> 00:00:14.286 I'm Susan Landry. I am a professor of pediatrics 00:00:14.366 --> 00:00:18.306 at the Children's Learning Institute at the University of Texas, 00:00:18.306 --> 00:00:24.156 Houston Health Science Center, and the director of the Institute and a program called CIRCLE, 00:00:24.776 --> 00:00:29.216 the Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning in Education. 00:00:29.416 --> 00:00:32.526 Phonological awareness is all auditory. 00:00:32.616 --> 00:00:36.986 That means children are listening, hearing sounds, 00:00:37.356 --> 00:00:41.096 and then trying to play with manipulating those sounds. 00:00:41.646 --> 00:00:51.416 For example, rhyming cat, bat, hat-that would be a beginning area of phonological awareness 00:00:51.416 --> 00:00:53.836 for a young child to be exposed to. 00:00:54.616 --> 00:01:01.956 It's different from phonics in that it's not linked to the written word, 00:01:02.566 --> 00:01:10.886 so that a child is really just learning at this point to hear and pay attention to sounds 00:01:10.886 --> 00:01:15.016 and to be able to manipulate the sounds themselves. 00:01:15.626 --> 00:01:19.716 The term "phonological awareness" is very descriptive of what's going on. 00:01:20.056 --> 00:01:25.506 They are, or young children are becoming very aware of sounds. 00:01:25.506 --> 00:01:30.816 And we take that for granted-phonological awareness 00:01:30.816 --> 00:01:32.956 for most adults is sort of second nature. 00:01:32.956 --> 00:01:41.566 You hear sounds, you can make the first sound of a word, but for a young child, 00:01:42.246 --> 00:01:47.656 listening for the first sounds of a word and separating it from the second part of the word 00:01:47.656 --> 00:01:56.586 like "sidewalk" or "s-ide" and putting those back together-that's a very new thing for them, 00:01:56.746 --> 00:01:59.666 a new activity to get involved in. 00:01:59.666 --> 00:02:08.106 We're learning that phonological awareness is one of the most critical things a child needs 00:02:08.106 --> 00:02:14.866 to be exposed to along with language building activities and print knowledge, 00:02:15.216 --> 00:02:20.196 or print awareness activities, to prepare them to be successful to learn to read. 00:02:20.826 --> 00:02:26.376 And, it's important because they are beginning 00:02:26.416 --> 00:02:32.396 to sensitize themselves to learn to hear those sounds. 00:02:32.996 --> 00:02:40.256 And reading is about making sense of written words on the page. 00:02:40.546 --> 00:02:45.006 And being able to translate a written word into sounds. 00:02:45.606 --> 00:02:53.796 So this is that beginning piece where the child starts to pay attention to the fact 00:02:53.796 --> 00:02:58.116 that there are different sounds, that words are made up of different sounds, 00:02:58.376 --> 00:03:06.246 before they get to that symbolic stage of seeing printed words and having to put that together 00:03:06.246 --> 00:03:08.736 with the sounds those printed words make. 00:03:09.176 --> 00:03:17.116 We are learning from an analysis in reading of all of the research that has been conducted 00:03:17.276 --> 00:03:25.696 from the 1920s to present-that phonological awareness is one of the key predictors 00:03:25.986 --> 00:03:30.486 of reading success in schools if it occurs in the early childhood period. 00:03:31.336 --> 00:03:39.006 We know that there are stages of learning or a continuum of skills in the area 00:03:39.006 --> 00:03:41.336 of phonological awareness development. 00:03:41.766 --> 00:03:50.606 I often refer to a chart that shows us one sort of way of illustrating that continuum. 00:03:50.846 --> 00:03:58.396 The early stages that maybe would be occurring at the beginning of that pre-k year are things 00:03:58.396 --> 00:04:04.436 like children playing with rhyming, hearing that the ends of words sound the same, 00:04:07.126 --> 00:04:12.296 segmenting sentences into words, segmenting words into syllables. 00:04:13.296 --> 00:04:21.875 But, you want to see that in that classroom, not too late in the year, 00:04:22.506 --> 00:04:29.816 they're getting to more complex levels of the continuum, such as being able 00:04:29.816 --> 00:04:35.776 to blend the sounds in words, or segment the sounds in words. 00:04:35.976 --> 00:04:42.606 More complex and probably more important than the early stages of separating a sentence 00:04:42.606 --> 00:04:47.876 into words or a word into syllables, or being able to string out a string 00:04:47.876 --> 00:04:53.056 of rhyming words like hat, bat, sat, mat. 00:04:53.056 --> 00:05:03.466 They also get to the point where they can take a word and if you said, "Say the word 'hat' 00:05:03.576 --> 00:05:06.286 without 'h,'" and they can go, "Hat." 00:05:07.116 --> 00:05:10.816 Or, "What happens if you put 'h' and 'at' together?" 00:05:11.406 --> 00:05:12.516 and they can say, "Hat." 00:05:13.066 --> 00:05:16.696 Those are critically important aspects of a continuum. 00:05:16.816 --> 00:05:20.826 Combining sounds and letters has a great benefit because, ultimately, 00:05:20.826 --> 00:05:27.866 children need to be able to, when they read, recognize that when they see that letter 00:05:27.866 --> 00:05:32.576 on the page, that there's a sound that goes with that letter. 00:05:33.106 --> 00:05:40.906 That's what we're trying to develop in pre-k, the knowledge base around the names 00:05:40.906 --> 00:05:46.646 of the letters and the sounds letters make, and also that these words that are made 00:05:46.646 --> 00:05:53.316 up of letters have initial sounds and ending sounds. 00:05:53.546 --> 00:05:59.136 And you're doing that by giving them all the pieces to the puzzle, 00:05:59.886 --> 00:06:06.396 and when you bring phonological awareness activities together with letter recognition 00:06:06.646 --> 00:06:10.096 and that letters have sounds, you're beginning to put the pieces 00:06:10.096 --> 00:06:18.876 of the puzzle together with them.