Sounding out

Pecans, how do YOU pronounce it?

Go ahead. Try to pronounce it. Do you say "PEE-kahn" or "puh-KAHN"?  Leave your pronunciation down below in the comments. I am not sure if there is a correct way of saying it. The main point is to show you that we all pronounce things differently. We try to sound out words according to what we hear from our parents and teachers. Sometimes our accents can be really thick and we have trouble. 

I wanted to share with you a website that I found Lost Aliens https://www.starfall.com/h/index.php?mg=m . This website is for Pre-K students to third grade. Although this website teaches students other subjects, I wanted to point out the reading part. I will divide this website into two different blogs to be able to share my findings with you.

The first part of this website that I enjoyed is a game that helps the student sound out words. It takes it letter by letter. Stretching out the word, at the same time it shows the image of the object. In the picture below, the word is ham. The letter turns red as it is being sounded out. /h/ /a/ /m/ and the little cart with the image of ham passes by.

In the second image shown down below the lever and a button appear. If you press the lever it changes to a completely new word. If you press the red button it just changes the first letter of the word.  It is a very motivating game that helps the child to sound out the letters. 

This website has sections where they use the same book to complete different activities; such as pronunciation and sight-reading. There is another game where the same words from the books are being repeated. This seems very helpful since kids can lose interest and need fun activities. The following game is a bit different (see image below).

This website also has a "Read to me" library. Sadly, this is only in English and it highlights the sentence instead of word by word. 

This website can still be very beneficial for teachers and parents to show the student. There is more to this website but I will leave it for my next blog Expanding Vocabulary coming this Sunday, Nov 15.