Sharing the Good News of Phonological/Phonemic Awareness!

It’s that time again…the beginning of a new school year! With virtually all of the Atlanta schools starting up sometime in August, we at SightWords.com have been busy presenting our new Phonological/Phonemic Awareness curriculum at conferences and workshops for preschool teachers. On August 7th, we did two one-hour presentations for preschool teachers from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, which held a wonderful conference at Holy Family Catholic Church in Marietta. In each session, we started with a brief explanation of what Phonological/Phonemic Awareness is and why it’s so important for children to learn. Then we demonstrated some of our favorite games and activities, such as Pack the Plane! and Syllable Softball. We even gave the teachers a tutorial in the proper pronunciations of all the letter sounds (phonemes). We were invited to the conference by Terry Graham, Director of Parish Preschools for the archdiocese. Terry is also on the board of the Georgia Preschool Association. Since the GPA is sponsoring the development of the SightWords.com Phonological/Phonemic Awareness curriculum, Terry wanted to be sure that the teachers at her own preschools had an opportunity to hear about it!

“I love this idea. I intend to start on Monday. It sounds wonderful. I really appreciate that it is free and can be used by the parents as well.”

We were especially encouraged when we looked at our evaluation forms afterwards. So many teachers told us that they intended to start teaching our Phonological/Phonemic Awareness lessons in the first week of the new school year! We really have worked hard to make our curriculum very straightforward and easy to implement in the classroom, and it’s wonderful to hear that you agree!