Yesterday I attended the first of my three days of S.M.A.R.T. Teacher training. I had received an informal training before the start of school so for the past three weeks I have already utilized the resources from this curriculum model. However, the formal training at the Syllables Reading Center is already proving to be invaluable!
S.M.A.R.T., Systematic Multisensory Approach to Reading Training, uses a multisensory approach to teaching reading, writing and spelling. The lessons are fun and exciting for kids! The material starts off with a consonant party! You have balloons at your party, which make different sounds, and you have nosy neighbors at your party that provide some more challenging, and nasally, consonant sounds. Then you move on to Vowel Valley, to actually begin making words, and there you can start introducing Criminal Words (the difficult sight words). In my Language Arts class we already learned our “poppers”, a type of balloon at the party, which include the following sounds: /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /ch/, /j/, /k/, & /g/ and started a brief introduction to the “leakers.”
We blew up some balloons and made popping noises by hitting them with our hands and actually popping them with pins! For the leakers, we blew up a balloon and let the air leak out, introducing the lip leakers /f/ and /v/.
We used phonemic awareness picture cards to represent starting sounds. After cutting them out (fine motor work!) we played games with them, from sorting and matching to memory, for sound pairs.
Yesterday’s training day was packed with information and I still have two days left! One of my favorite parts of yesterday’s training was receiving a profusion of techniques and activities for incorporating the four sensory methods of learning: auditory, visual, tactile and kinesthetic. I am looking forward to utilizing these in the classroom. For example, in teaching phonemic awareness you do not make actual letters available to the students but only present the sounds auditorially. Therefore, a good phonemic awareness activity is “People Movers”, where each person represents a phoneme and you move to different parts of the room to match up the phonemes, depending on what the teacher calls out. I can’t wait to try this, and many other activities, with our kids when I get back!