• Phonological work at the preschool level can boost reading and speaking skills.blackboard image by Renata Osinska from Fotolia.com
  
  Speech is not one large contiguous stream. Instead, it is the combination of thousands of smaller sounds and syllables. Phonological awareness is a term that is used to describe our grasp of the smaller parts of speech. It is thought that if you help young children grow their phonological awareness, it can help grow their language skills considerably.
  
  

Sound Identification

• This is a very beginner level activity, but is a good way to have children start connecting sounds to meaning. Play them a pre-recorded tape of various sounds such as the sounds that animals, vehicles and other environmental sources make. You could also make the sounds yourself. With their eyes closed, have the children tell you what makes the type of sound that they hear.
  
  

Syllable Counting

• Get children to count the syllables in words. Teach them to listen to the rhythmic quality of words that delineates separate syllables. You can have them clap along as they say words with two or three syllables, speaking one syllable per beat. Or, you can give the children percussive instruments. Say a word, and then ask them to make the same number of beats that there were syllables on their instruments.
  
  

Phoneme Manipulation

• While many phonological awareness activities contribute benefits to oral language skills, it is important to find ways to combine these with written language skills for maximum benefit. The National Reading Panel suggests that mixing sounds with letters when approaching phonological exercises is very beneficial. Have the children work with letters as they practice changing phonemes. So, if they spelled a word like "cat," they should then substitute in a new phoneme to turn the word into "bat." This process can go on as long as you want the exercise too, but the emphasis is on associating the changed phoneme to the letters that have changed.
  
  

Matching Sounds

• As children start to know more words and become better at associating sounds, you can have them start to match words to sounds. For instance, you would start to make a sound, and then ask the child to think of a word that starts with the same sound. Or, you could give several words that start with the same sound, and one that does not, and ask the child to identify the one that doesn't fit in. Or, play a naming game, where children have to think of words that start with the same sound as their own name, or the names of their classmates.