We have recently talked about the importance of teaching the baby to communicate before he can speak. Well, this is vital for our children to gradually acquire a very important capacity in the correct development of language, both spoken and written: phonological awareness.
This ability that we have since childhood is vitally important especially in the area of reading and writing. Therefore, it is very important that in the early stages of education (that is, the second cycle of early childhood education and the first cycle of primary education) this area be worked on in a very specific way, although in an appropriate way. But, What is phonological awareness?
Phonological awareness is (in a simple way and without many technicalities) the ability we have to segment and recognize these segments of language. This means that, thanks to her, children can be able to recognize and identify phonemes, syllables and words independently of each other.
Therefore, it follows that if our children showed some kind of difficulty in this specific ability, they could present problems at the language level, not only in the area of reading and writing, but also at the oral level, as can happen in the dyslalias
When our children are young, their awareness about the sounds that form the language around them is barely developed. They are able to capture them, but they do it as if it were a block; they don't know that they can be segmented into smaller parts: the phrases in words, these in syllables and these in sounds.
Probably someone can ask how does all this influence language development. Very easy: thanks to the ability to differentiate the different components of language, we can identify words that rhyme with each other, we can segment the words, invent words with meaning simply by changing a sound (for example seal / mouth) ...
To help develop it, both in cases where they are still in the process of acquiring it and in those in which it is altered, there is a wide variety of exercises. However, as personal advice, and supporting what our partner Mireia recently told us, it is very important to base the exercises on the game.
One of the ones that children like best is the cubes game. It is a simple game where, on each of its faces, we find a certain letter. It is an activity very similar to the Scrabble of a lifetime (or the current Apalabrados), the only thing that adapting them to the tastes of children in order to make them attractive to them.
We can make them form words with a certain number of cubes and the letters that appear, say a list of words that begin, contain or end the letter that appears on a face of the cube, words of a certain family (animals, fruits ...). It all depends on the imagination of each of us.
We can make the little ones enjoy learning by playing. In addition, it does not have to be all commercialized; If we are a little handyman and we have enough imagination, we can make a multitude of games that you will love and that will make us have fun (as well as educational) moments with our children.
Before finishing, I would like to make a note about the prominence given to literacy in nursery school. From my point of view, this eagerness for children to start primary education by reading and writing makes other basic learning learnings move, such as psychomotor skills, orientation and spatial structuring, rhythm, language and communication, social skills, creativity ...
It is very important to keep in mind that not all children follow the same rhythm in the acquisition of different learning, and this includes phonological awareness. This is normal since, from the cognitive point of view, many functions are interrelated that interrelate with each other. The problem begins when we meet children who have not sufficiently matured these areas.
To all this, we must add the desire for comparison that some parents have. There is no hurry. Phonological awareness It is a skill that not everyone has to develop at the same time.
