Blending and Segmenting Sounds to Instill Phoneme Awareness

One activity is segmenting sounds and then blending them together using both real words and nonsense words. This activity gives students practice manipulating phenomes and is consistent with the research supporting stimulation of both posterior processing systems (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003). Another activity is oral blending and segmenting paired with letters. This process may help students practice the alphabetic principle (the establishment of a correspondence between a phonem...

 Role of Mirror Neurons in Learning to Read

In terms of early diagnosis, one study of thousands of babies “gaze-following” found that the skill appears first at about 10 to 11 months, and that babies who weren’t proficient at gaze-following by the time they were 1 year old had much less advanced language skills at age 2 (Brooks & Meltzoff , 2005). Another possibility with regard to mirror neuron research is that early and systematic priming (stimulating) of mirror neurons engaged in speech could be a strategy for building th...

 Gamification Racing/Grid Movement

Ms. Spooner, a long-time game player, realizes that the Racing/Grid Movement mechanic is the right choice for her students because it is particularly good at helping to assess highly granular pieces of content or skills. She envisions a game in which her students are divided into two- or threeperson teams. She wants these students to be able to identify and produce three different things: (1) the pitch of particular notes, (2) the sounds of distinct instruments, and (3) the work of particular...

 Onomatopoeia, Sound Symbolism, and Phonesthesia

Onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are the seeds of a more pervasive phenomenon in language called phonesthesia, in which families of words share a teeny snatch of sound and a teeny shred of meaning. Many words with the sound sn-, for example, have something to do with the nose, presumably because you can almost feel your nose wrinkle when you pronounce it. They include words for the nose itself (like snout), words for noselike instruments (like snorkel and snoot, a cone for directing a spotlig...