Developing Phonemic Awareness: How’s Your Nose, Rose?
You won’t regret using wordplay to support your child’s phonemic awareness – good phonemic awareness will help a young child with reading readiness and spelling.
At one of my Parent Education programs at a preschool last Fall, I talked about the importance of helping children to develop phonemic awareness. I explained that, together with alphabet recognition, good phonemic awareness is critically important for young learners. We want children to understand that words are made up of sounds and we’d like them to learn to play with the sounds in words. Developing a good understanding of rhyming is one element of this. Children who ‘get’ the concept of rhyming are gaining phonemic awareness.
After my presentation, one of the moms in the audience told me that she’s been playing, “How’s Your Nose, Rose?” with her young son. The game begins with one of them asking, “How’s Your Nose, Rose?” The other replies with, “How’s Your Back, Jack?” and the game continues until every possible body part rhyme has been exploited; “How’s your toe, Joe?”, “”How’s your arm, Parm?”, “How’s your leg, Peg?”, “How’s your brain, Jane?” etc.
What great fun and what a marvelous learning opportunity; it doesn’t cost a penny, it can be done anywhere, and asking, “How’s your nose, Rose?” just might make waiting in a long line a tiny bit easier. If you have a great idea for an inexpensive, portable reading lesson, I hope you’ll share it with us.
So, how’s your tummy, Mommy?
Be sure to click to visit our Phonemic Awareness page and learn more about this important indicator of readiness for reading and writing
For more information, visit our page about phonemic awareness.
