Thursday, April 23, 2009

Phonemic Awareness

For years I taught school, but it wasn't until I took the training in the Lindamood Auditory Discrimination in Depth method  (now called LiPS©) that I understood the importance of phonemic awareness.  Once I had the training, I was so excited to teach it to others.  However, at that time, 20 years ago, there were very few resources available for children.   The materials available were sterile, clinical and not very engaging for young learners.

In the alternate method of introducing vowels and consonants, only 6 consonant sounds and 3 vowel sounds are introduced to begin tracking, spelling and reading.  This limits reading materials quite a bit!  I asked my mother, who is an artist and a very creative person, to write a story using mostly words made from p, b, t, d, k, g, i, o, oo.  As you can imagine, that's quite a challenge!  Yet,  she came up with a few stories and was ready for some new sounds.  We began to add consonants, vowels and sight words as the program suggests.  Stories kept popping out of our heads and thus "Poppin Creations" was born.

We started out with 9 little story books called Poppin Readers that took the reader through most of the consonant and vowel sounds.  We produced the books ourselves and marketed them in our small area and through those that knew us and encouraged us to continue. Eventually, a customer suggested we produce our books through ProEd. We contacted them and they were happy to take us on.  And the rest, as they say, is history.  

Our set is now the Poppin Reading Series  and includes 15 Sound-by-Sound Storybooks.  A teacher's guide is also available which includes extra word chains, practice sentences, worksheets and a little reproducible Take Home Book.  It is listed by ProEd at the following link  http://proedinc.com/customer/productView.aspx?ID=2822

I am constantly trying to find more materials and develop more materials to help in the teaching/learning process using phonemic awareness.  If you have other materials or methods that work, I would be happy to hear about them.

Becky Stayton