Getting Down with Letter Sounds (Letter A): Phonics and Performing Arts pt.1

One of the hardest concepts to convey to early learners is the understanding of letters and their corresponding sounds, especially in English. This is due to the lack of one to one correspondences for most English letters (i.e. graphemes) and their letter sounds (i.e. phonemes). That is to say, the letter sounds that correspond to the letters aren’t always the same in every word environment because English has had a variety of influences from so many different languages. 

This class will introduce students to phonemic notation, which are symbols that represent phonemes (i.e. letter sounds). Specifically, the letter sounds that will be of focus in this class correspond to the letter 'A'. Since the letter 'A' correlates to nine different sounds, we won't cover them all in this class. The first few sounds, approximately 3-4, will be covered here, in this initial class. Eventually, I'd like to turn Getting Down with Language sounds into a multi-part series; however, being that this is my first class, I want to get the lay of the land, as it were. 

My teaching style incorporates lots of rhythmic and entertainment elements, particularly, music, dance, lyricism, and theater. I focus on call and response and repetition. Therefore, my approach is multimodal, meaning I want to engage the learners using many, if not all of their sensory inputs, audial, visual, and kinesthetic.