Preschool and early school years are crucial for children to develop their language and literacy skills and increase the linguistic repertoire to use it during conversation, narration, reading, and writing (Owens, 2015). For this reason, children can acquire tremendous benefits from home or classroom activities targeted at enhancing their literacy and language skills to ensure success in the future. Such activities are differentiated into listening, rhyming, and alliteration activities. For example, in a rhyming activity, a child is given two sentences that contain a word to which he or she should come up with a rhyme (bell-smell, noise-choice, etc.).
Another successful rhyme activity is the “Rhyme Go Fish” game. In this game, a child is given a “pond” of words that he or she should fish out to make rhymes (Mascott, 2016). This activity is also beneficial for helping children getting a grasp of word families and how words can be either similar or different. An example of syllables activity for preschoolers is giving children cubes with syllables that make up different words. An excellent alliteration activity for preschoolers is the “Alliteration Picnic”, which is usually a meal or a snack where every food is labeled with alliterated names such as “moo milk”, “tasty tomatoes”, “saucy sausages,” etc. The child should try to remember the names and then compose a short “I’m going on a picnic” story using new words.
Because preschool children lack the knowledge of sounds and may confuse similarly spelled words (Reading Rockets, 2015), the examples of learning activities above will help them to get a better grasp of the key language principles such as rhyming, alliteration, and syllables. It is also important that these learning activities facilitate multi-sensory responses, for example, the “Rhyme Go Fish” game helps children to develop both rhyming and syllables recognition skills.
References
Mascott, A. (2016). The 3 best rhyme games for kids. Web.
Owens, R. E. (2015). Language development: An introduction (9th ed.). London, UK: Pearson College Div.
Reading Rockets. (2015). Introduction: How children learn to read. Web.