It can be difficult for parents of young children to figure out how the songs, games, and stories their children enjoy at preschool can be preparing the youngsters for future academics. While it may look as though the children are “just playing,” the play is carefully designed to teach content standards.
According to Early Learning Content Standards for Ohio, three important content areas in English Language Arts are Phonological and Phonemic Awareness, Word Recognition, and Fluency.
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness in Preschool
Activities are designed to help children learn to identify matching sounds, recognize rhymes, hear sounds by isolating syllables in words, and differentiate between sounds that are the same and different.
Childrens’ literature with rollicking rhymes makes little ones laugh, but these stories also teach the concept of rhyming. Learning to identify matching sounds takes lots of practice. Children often take quite a while to understand the difference between …
