The Mindful SLP Podcast: Under the Umbrella of Phonological Awareness - Ep - 010
If you’ve ever wanted a concise breakdown of the earliest developing, oh so important, phonological awareness skills, join us as we explore just what is under the umbrella term “phonological awareness.”
Phonemic Awareness in Young Children by (non-affiliate link)
The app I use for animals sounds is called "Animal Sounds.!" (non-affiliate link)
The animal sounds are split into categories, such as farm, jungle, insects etc. Be aware that the rabbit sound in farm animals may be distressing for some clients, as it sounds like the rabbit is in pain.
Theme Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Transcript
Dan: Welcome to The Mindful SLP, the podcast for SLPs looking for simple tools and optimal outcomes. Your host is Denise, experienced speech therapist specializing in all things pediatric, and Dan business manager for her private clinic.
Thanks for listening to The Mindful SLP today. We're going to start off with a little story. Denise and I were at the pool the other day and being a speech therapist, she saw this experience and she just had to tell us about it.
Denise: I heard a mom and her child going through this little chant, much like when we would say when we were young, uh, see you later, alligator - after a while, crocodile. The child didn't quite have her part down. And so the mom just kept coaching her through. Now, it's your turn, this is what you say, until the child had it down pat, and they could do this little back and forth chant, and inside I'm cheering. I'm going, oh, this is so awesome. Mom, you do not know all the things you are teaching your child, just so many phonological awareness skills.
Dan: That's awesome. Today. We want to talk a little more about phonological awareness, but we want to step back a little bit and look at the entire umbrella of phonological awareness. So Denise, tell me what you mean by the umbrella. What is it?
Denise: Phonological awareness is a global awareness of the sounds we use in speech and the ability to manipulate those sounds.
So it's an umbrella term because it includes two areas, early developing skills such as rhyming, alliteration, and word and syllable awareness. And it includes phonemic awareness. That's a later developing skill where you can manipulate individual phonemes within words, like in my mind, I can say, I like got the word cat. I want to change that middle sound app to an Aw. And now I've got the word cot. That's why it's called phonemic awareness, you can mentally move phonemes around.
Dan: Phonological awareness, phonemic awareness. Do people get these terms mixed up? Because A, they're really, really long, and B, they sound almost the same.
Denise: Yes. And they get used interchangeably at times. And I actually used the term phonemic awareness in episode four, when I was talking more about the early listening skills, just because I'm coming clean. Well, the book I referred to use the term phonemic awareness, even though they talk about the whole spectrum of phonological awareness, they talk about everything under the umbrella.
So we have this umbrella term for global listening. Now think about under the umbrella, we have the term phonemic awareness that's for the advanced skill of manipulating sounds and words. We don't have a specific term for what's under the other part of the umbrella.
Dan: Oh, and that's what you're calling early listening skills.
Denise: Yeah, exactly. And I wonder if we don't have a specific name for them because we don't give these early skills enough credit. I wonder if we underestimate everything that goes into them. I'm referring to them as early listening skills here on this podcast, as I go through them, you'll notice that memory, attention and sequencing plus the awareness of sounds. I mean, they're all really involved and interconnected.
Dan: So today then we're going to be focusing on that in our podcast. Are we going to talk about everything under the umbrella or just the early listening skills?
Denise: Today, we're just going to cover the early listening skills thoroughly, all that I didn't cover in episode four. Okay. So in episode four, we mainly talked about rhyming and in our next podcast, I'm going to go over phonemic awareness and an assessment and tracking tool I've developed. So after the next podcast, I think we'll have covered everything under the umbrella of phonological awareness.
Dan: If you didn't get to episode four, after you've finished listening today, please go back and listen to that one, because that, one's also important to get the whole picture of everything under the umbrella.
This is pretty important though. I mean, we're spending three podcasts on this. What's so important about it?
Denise: That's a great question. Phonological awareness is crucial for reading and spelling success because that's how they learn to decode and spell printed words. And also I've personally found that it's really important in some cases for a child who has articulation disorders to learn how to speak clearly and how to use prosody correctly.
Dan: So that's speaking, reading, writing, what's left? Everything's there.
Denise: It affects all the communication.
Dan: So this is really a foundational skill that we really need to get established to really build everything of language on.
Denise: Yes, it's really important. And that's why I'm doing three podcasts on it. I honestly thught the one podcast would be enough, which is why these are not exactly in order. And then I started diving into it and I'm like, oh man, there is so much to this phonological awareness. It's huge, and next in importance to motor development. When you have a child with a severe speech impairment, after you've helped them establish good motor control. I can almost guarantee you that they will need to work on phonological awareness.
And so it's really important. You make sure these early skills are solid before moving into phonemic awareness. And that doesn't even include the children who maybe don't have a speech disorder, but are coming to you for language, um, disorders.
Dan: Okay. So these skills are really important. Let's, let's walk through each one of them. Take us on a quick rundown of these skills.
Denise: The activities I'm going to describe, which are related to certain skills, many of them are described in the book Phonemic Awareness and Young Children, but I've added some of my own. I've expanded on some of them. A lot of them might add visual supports for them since we are talking about language impaired children and the visual is so important for them.
So we're going to talk about listening to environmental sounds and animal sounds, listening to sequences of sounds, chants and hand-clapping games, listening to nursery rhymes, listening for unexpected words, following a sequence of directions, repeating sequences of words, one-to-one word correspondence, and syllable counting. And I'm not covering rhyming since we did that in episode four.
Dan: Let's talk about each one of these skills. Now, a little bit more detail. So let's start with environmental sounds. What is an environmental sound? Give me an example. Ooh, siren. So it's just something that we're going to hear natural in the world is it's it's an environmental sound. Okay.
Denise: And some children don't tune into those very well. So one of the activities you can do is have them close their eyes and figure out what sounds they're hearing, really depending on if there are ambient sounds in your speech room. You could just listen to those, a clock ticking, or maybe listening to their own heart beating, but at the very young and wiggly that might not work so well, or there's lots and lots of apps out there that you could play to get them to identify environmental sounds, see if they can do it with their eyes closed, but if they can't...
Dan: And that's to help them concentrate, right? And to really focus on listening, as opposed to seeing things.
Denise: But if you need the picture supports, bring them in, in fact, a really cool app I use, the fireplace app.
Dan: I remember that we talked about that when in the simple tools video of the marshmallow roasts.
Denise: Yes. Well, that's a cool crackling fireplace sound. That would be a really cool one to play.
Dan: That's a good one. Okay. How about animal sounds? I think this one was probably almost self-explanatory. I mean, mooooooo...
Denise: Yes, you, you make sounds as you play with the animals, but then you see if they can identify animal sounds without seeing them. There's an app I use, um, that plays farm animal sounds and they love it. And there's all sorts of things out there. Sequences of sound. I had no idea. How challenging this might be for some clients? Well, I found that listening to sequences of sounds with your eyes closed and remembering them can really challenge some kids.
Dan: Okay. So give me an example here. I'm going to close my eyes, uh, feel free to join us unless you're driving your car right now. Don't close your eyes. I'll close my eyes and you give me a sequence of sounds.
(Silliness ensues...) Okay. So we had clapping hands and popping your mouth. Okay. And some kids struggle with this. What does that look like in these kids?
Denise: They can usually only remember the first sound that they hear. Again, I'll use picture supports for this, just to help them get it in their memory. You're really training an auditory memory here, when you do these things.
Dan: How do you do this in a therapy session?
Denise: I lay out one more picture than the number of sounds I'm making. So if you do two, you lay out three, three pictures, and I make sure they can remember one sound, but that's usually pretty easy. It's when you go from one to two, that it can become kind of hard for them.
I have them close their eyes. I make two sounds. They open their eyes and they identify the two sounds I made, hopefully in order, and we work on that. And then I take a turn. I close my eyes. They make two sounds so I can model. And some of the pictures I have or things like tapping a pencil on the table, clapping hands, stomping, feet, stompy things, the things they can do, not snapping fingers 'cause most kids can't snap their fingers. I did make a picture of scissors cutting paper, until I realized I did not want preschoolers cutting paper with my eyes closed.
Dan: Yeah, that would not be good.
Denise: Yeah, no scissors when the therapist's eyes are closed. But so really you just want to build their ability to remember an auditory sequence, because what is a word? Sounds in sequence? Yeah.
Dan: Okay. So then there's a number of chants and hand-clapping games, you know, there, there's just hundreds of those out there. I don't even know where to start. What guidance do you have for SLPs on those games?
Denise: It's better to start really, really easy. Okay. I love one, two buckle my shoe, one potato, two potato. Those are some of my favorites
Dan: So yeah, start really, really basic.
Denise: Bingo B I N G O I mean, I watched a girl and her grandmother doing Ms. Mary Mack, Mack, on the internet the other day, and it was so cute, but oh my goodness. So much complicated hand clapping and so many words. Ms. Mary Mack, Mack Mack, all dressed in black, black, black with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, like it's too many words for these little kids. Yeah. It's too complex for where they're at at that time, I tried to get them to clap in sync with me. I mean, this is really... and when you can get a child in sync with you and clapping hands with you, there's a certain increase in intention and in mindfulness, that is really powerful. So you see mindfulness comes in everywhere, right? That's why we're called The Mindful SLP.
Dan: These chants can do double duty as nursery rhymes. How do you use nursery rhymes?
Denise: I absolutely love nursery rhymes and I skimmed right over them in episode four. I just barely mentioned them because I have 10 nursery rhyme coloring pages that go with the prime-to-rhyme cards that I talked about in episode four.
Let me back up a little bit and give you some context for this. I was working with a first grader several years ago, who just did not understand rhyming. And I was trying to figure out what skill he was missing. You know, what was proceeding this rhyming, because if I said cat, he couldn't for the life of him say bat. Right. Then I realized that the smaller, a unit of sound is the harder it is to capture and remember, so I wondered if he could recognize and remember the last word in a line of text since a word is a bigger unit than a final sound, right? Right. So if I said Jack and Jill, would he remember that the last word was Jill? Guess what? He could not, he would say Jack.
Dan: So the last word of the sentence that he heard, that he could remember, it was just Jack.
Denise: It was, it was the first word. And that's what I fell in with a lot of kids. They remember the first word, and this is after I have checked by the way that they can distinguish first and last. I mean, you would need to check that. But even when they do and you ask them what the last word is, their auditory memory doesn't remember the last word.
Dan: So if they don't know what the last word they hear is and how could they figure out what the last phoneme? I mean, if they don't even remember Jill, there's no way they're going to get to 'ull'.
Denise: Yeah, yeah. Or the ill to run with hill.
Dan: So, because it's all based on that rhyming's all based on that final sound in the word.
Denise: Yeah, and that was my epiphany. Some may have thought of it before, but it's new to me. So ever since then, I make sure to assess where our clients are in regards to remembering and recognizing the last words in a line before I start asking them to discriminate what rhymes are to generate rhymes, the way we'll do that is I'll help them remember and recognize what the last word is, get that really firm. And then I will start pausing, Jack and... Yeah. And then once I can do that, I'll go Jack and Jill went up the... hill and we'll go, oh, Jill and hill, do those sound the same? They do. And so, I mean, if they don't have this skill, they generally need a lot of practice to get that down.
Dan: So the next skill that they need to be working on then is listening for unexpected words. This sounds interesting to me, I think I kind of have an idea what you're going for here. Tell me more about this.
Denise: It's to develop their ability to attend to the difference between what they expect to hear and what they actually hear. So you're going to take familiar stories or nursery rhymes and change something, and since they already know some nursery rhymes, cause you just did them, it works well. There you can substitute words, reverse word order, andso on...
Dan: Baa baa blue sheep and a doc hickory dickery. No, doc dickery hickory.
Denise: Well, either one works there, right?
Dan: Right, yeah, I could have some fun with this.
Denise: It's fun and it's so valuable when you know what you hear wrong, then you're better able to know what is right. Um, it really makes them think and reflect on what it should sound like. And by the way, this is a really valuable skill for a kid who has an articulation disorder for them to self monitor. They need to know what they're saying is right, or if it's wrong.
Dan: Listening to a sequence of directions, this sounds important.
Denise: It is. And you wouldn't normally have put it under phonological awareness, but I put it here because I just found that the kids needed this. They needed to be able to follow these directions. And it's not like we don't do this as SLPs, I'm just putting it here under the skill, because I think it is an early listening skill.
And again, I use pictures. I have pictures of touching your nose, waving your hands, and doing a star jump, all sorts of things. And I see if they can remember two directions in a row. With pictures and then without pictures, and again we take turns and this is so great for those kids who are wiggly at the start because they get some wiggles out. Yeah. And then they're building the auditory memory.
Dan: So repeating sequences of words, what do you mean by this?
Denise: It's being able to independently remember a line or a chant or a nursery rhyme without leaving any words out or substituting words. Remember that story I told at the beginning and that mom was coaching her daughter through remembering the words in the exact order coming in when it was her turn, all of that. So something as simple as one, two buckle my shoe. That's five words, right? And so many language impaired children can't even remember five words in a row without changing or leaving words out. So this challenges their memory, their phonological awareness. And by the way, in case you haven't noticed memory plays a big part in phonological awareness. Someday I'll have to do a podcast just on memory alone.
Dan: So there'll be four podcasts on phonological awareness?
Denise: No memory is, memory intersects. Think of a Venn diagram. Memory means more than just this, but it's super important.
Dan: Yeah. The next one, what in the world is one-to-one word correspondence.
Denise: Okay. I gave it that name. I don't know what other people call it. I mean, you could call it counting words, but I do a little bit more than that. This develops along with remembering a word sequence. It's understanding the separability of words, that each word is its own unit. So I'm going to give you an example, a little girl I was working with just this week. I was trying to get her to remember one, two buckle, my shoe.
Okay. Five words. So I had five carpet markers on the floor and we stepped on a carpet marker for each word. What was so interesting? She could get one too. Buckle. And then when she got to my, she kind of forget the word or I would prompt her and she'd say my, it should get to the last carpet marker. And she'd say buckle shoe or my shoe, or buckle my shoe, the whole thing over again.
She did not understand each word as its own unit. When she got to the end of the rhyme, she just rushed through it and added words. And so we just went over and over and over again, and she was fascinated. She stuck with it for 20 minutes and we did two lines, three, four, shut the door because I thought she's going to get tired of the first line. It was just what she needed.
Dan: The next skill a syllable counting. Now this seems self-explanatory. I did a lot of this in grade school. I remember counting syllables.
Denise: Yeah, it is pretty easy to understand. I usually start with teaching one to three syllables. When they're really good at that. I add in four, depending how old they are. I could add in five syllables. For younger children, I don't usually go beyond four syllables, but here's a little tip that I learned from that book, Phonemic Awareness in Young Children. If they're having trouble clapping the syllables, have them put their hand under their jaw, under their chin. And every time their jaw opens is a syllable because that's the vowel right?
You can count the syllables, you're going to recognize them by feeling your jaw, feeling your jaw open. So children who are aware of syllables and have the necessary motor control can achieve clear speech. Okay. Mumbling, half spoken words, guessing at words, it all gets so much better with the ability to count syllables. Our language is syllable based. So a lot of these skills, in a manner of speaking, overlay syllable awareness.
Dan: Wow. So there's a lot of these different, uh, skills that have to be mastered who knew there was so much involved in early listening.
Denise: I didn't really 'til I started diving into it. I mean, I knew it because I have all these activities, but until I started listing them out, I was like, oh wow, there's a lot going on here. I picture a pyramid under the umbrella. So the early listening skills are very broad and they support that phonemic awareness that comes up to a tip at the top because really, phonemic awareness, just manipulating sounds within words, I mean, it sounds like it's a smaller skill, but it's actually a refinement of all of these skills.
Dan: All right. So you've brought us a lot of information to think about. I mean, these early listening skills are very important.
Denise: Don't underestimate the power of them. We tend to move too fast over these. They really need to be mastered. Clients need a depth of knowledge at this level. Very basic. Build the foundation.
I hope you enjoy all three podcasts on phonological awareness. Even if they have come to you in a mixed up order, the assessment and tracking sheet I'll share with you next time will lay it all out. Please go back and listen to episode four called The Developmental Sequence of Phonemic Awareness, if you haven't heard it already.
And I hope you'll join us in two weeks as we go over phonemic awareness and assessment and progress monitoring. Thanks for listening.
Dan: Thank you for listening to The Mindful SLP. We hope you found some simple tools that will have optimal outcomes in your practice. This podcast is sponsored by SLP Pro Advisor. Visit SLP pro-advisor dot com for more tools, including Impossible R Made Possible, Denise's highly effective course for treating those troublesome Rs.
A link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please give us a five-star rating and tell your fellow SLPs. And please let us know what you think. Join the conversation at SLP pro-advisor dot com.
