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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Souns® and Rhymes


This Class Was Born of Necessity.
Children today need Souns® and Rhymes.
The design of this class is family literacy at its best.
Parents or caregivers attend with a child, age 0-3. 



Mother goose
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.  The classes is interactive and hands-on, bringing language and literacy to life.
The latest neuroscience and reading research support the methodologies.
“…what can psychology and neuroscience recommend to teachers and parents who wish to optimize reading instruction? …we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme” (Dehaene, 2009, p. 228).
souns
Goal of Souns Time: Establish the alphabetic principal needed for reading
 “Souns is a hands-on early literacy program that teaches letter-sound associations through play.  The child is given the right information (letter sounds) at the right time (birth to three) in the right way (kinesthetically and incidentally.) This practice makes a powerful difference! ’ souns.org 
Hands-on, meaningful learning using Souns® helps bring the abstract world of literacy into the concrete realm, making it tangible and accessible for all children.   “The work of Maria Montessori and Jean Piaget confirms, what the hand experiences, the mind remembers” Souns, 2010, p. 4).
jack and jill
Goal of Rhyme Time: Establish phonemic awareness, the most critical first step in acquiring alphabetics.
Rhyme time consists of reading and experiencing a nursery rhyme.  The nursery rhyme is repeated and the “main idea” of the rhyme is present and real for the child to experience.  The purpose is to establish phonemic awareness and the language code using rhythm, rhyme, repetition and realia.
Rationale for Rhyme Time Using Neuroscience and Reading Research: 
“Phonememic Awareness and the Wise Mother Goose…                 Tucked inside “Hickory, dickory dock, a mouse ran up the clock” and other rhymes can be found a host of potential aids to sound awareness- alliteration, assonance, rhyme, repetition. Alliterative and rhyming sounds teach the young ear that words can sound similar because they share a first or last sound”  (Wolf, 2007, p. 98-99).  
What is the simple magic of letter sounds and nursery rhymes?
The brain is a pattern decoder and is constantly searching for connections and patterns in the surrounding world.  “Children make errors such as blowed and knowed more often than for any other kind of irregular verb.”  These errors are not made because of poor modeling.  The errors are made because the brain has picked up on patterns in the language and applies them to new situations” (Pinker, 2011, p. 72).
References 
Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The science and evolution of a human invention. New York, NY.  Penguin Viking.
Liberman, I., Shankweiler, D & Liberman A. (1990). The alphabetic principle and learning to read. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research. Retrieved March 29,2012 from http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR101/SR101_01.pdf
National Reading Panel. (2012). Report of the national reading panel: Teaching children to read reports of the subgroups Retrieved March 15, 2012, from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/report.cfm

Pinker, S. (2011) Words and rules:  The ingredients of language. New York, NY. HarperCollins Publishers.
Research and Development Staff. (2000). Nursery rhymes and phonemic awareness Sadlier-Oxford A Division of William H. Sadlier, Inc Retrieved July 14, 2012, from http://www.isd300.k12.mn.us/ES/kinder/KINDERGARTEN%20INFORMATION/nursery%20rhymes%20handout.pdf
Robb, D. (2007). Ox, house, stick: The history of our alphabet. Watertown, MA. Charlesbridge Publishing, Inc.
Souns. (2010). Souns® for literacy, Language and literacy develop hand in hand. (White Paper) Retrieved October 24, 2011, from
http://souns.org/images/texts/whitepaperforwebsite1.pdfhttp://souns.org/images/texts/whitepaperforwebsite1.pdf
Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY. Harper Perennial.

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