Souns® and Rhymes

Souns and Rhymes class is family literacy at its best.
Parents or caregivers attend with children who are not yet in school. 

The design of this class is to establish a foundation so firm that no holes will ever appear in foundational literacy skills.  It's the simplicity that makes the impact profound.  Souns and Rhymes consists of two core elements: letter sounds and nursery rhymes.  The class is interactive and hands-on, bringing language and literacy to life.  

Goal of Souns Time: Establish the alphabetic principle through letter sounds needed for reading 

Goal of Rhyme Time: Establish phonemic and phonological awareness, critical in acquiring alphabetics.

What is Souns?
 “Souns is a hands-on early literacy program that teaches letter-sound associations through play.  The child is given the right information (letter sounds) at the right time (birth to three) in the right way (kinesthetically and incidentally.) This practice makes a powerful difference! ’

Rationale Using Neuroscience and Reading Research: 

“Phonemic Awareness and the Wise Mother Goose…  Tucked inside “Hickory, dickory dock, a mouse ran up the clock” and other rhymes can be found a host of potential aids to sound awareness- alliteration, assonance, rhyme, repetition. Alliterative and rhyming sounds teach the young ear that words can sound similar because they share a first or last sound”  (Wolf, 2007, p. 98-99).  

“…what can psychology and neuroscience recommend to teachers and parents who wish to optimize reading instruction? …we know that conversion of letters into sounds is the key stage in reading acquisition. All teaching efforts should be initially focused on a single goal, the grasp of the alphabetic principle whereby each letter or grapheme represents a phoneme” (Dehaene, 2009, p. 228).

The brain is wired to solve and is constantly searching for connections and patterns in the surrounding world.  “Children make errors such as blowed and knowed more often than for any other kind of irregular verb.”  These errors are not made because of poor modeling.  The errors are made because the brain is wired for language. (Pinker, 2011, p. 72).

Rhyme time consists of reading and experiencing a nursery rhyme.  The nursery rhyme is repeated and the “main idea” of the rhyme is present and real for the child to experience.  The purpose is to establish phonemic and phonological awareness and the language code using rhythm, rhyme, repetition and realia.

References 

Dehaene, S. (2009). Reading in the brain: The science and evolution of a human invention. New York, NY.  Penguin Viking.

Liberman, I., Shankweiler, D & Liberman A. (1990). The alphabetic principle and learning to read. Haskins Laboratories Status Report on Speech Research. Retrieved March 29,2012 from http://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR101/SR101_01.pdf

National Reading Panel. (2012). Report of the national reading panel: Teaching children to read reports of the subgroups Retrieved March 15, 2012, from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/report.cfm

Pinker, S. (2011) Words and rules:  The ingredients of language. New York, NY. HarperCollins Publishers.

Research and Development Staff. (2000). Nursery rhymes and phonemic awareness Sadlier-Oxford A Division of William H. Sadlier, Inc Retrieved July 14, 2012, from http://www.isd300.k12.mn.us/ES/kinder/KINDERGARTEN%20INFORMATION/nursery%20rhymes%20handout.pdf

Robb, D. (2007). Ox, house, stick: The history of our alphabet. Watertown, MA. Charlesbridge Publishing, Inc.

Souns. (2010). Souns® for literacy, Language and literacy develop hand in hand. (White Paper) Retrieved October 24, 2011, from
http://souns.org/images/texts/whitepaperforwebsite1.pdfhttp://souns.org/images/texts/whitepaperforwebsite1.pdf

Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY. Harper Perennial.