Mum's the Word

Since my phonemic awareness workshop, I have tried to find ways to implement what I learned into my classoom.

One of the steps in the whole phonological awareness process is syllable awareness. My instructor had introduced a game to help introduce syllable deletion. She held up a little puppet she called "Mum" and showed us how she would have the children say a word, and then say it again without saying part of the word. "Mum" the puppet would eat the other part of the word. Such as....Say popcorn. Say it again but don't say corn! The children would say "pop" and then "Mum" would eat "corn".

I thought this was a cute idea, and my instructor gave us a whole list of words to try out starting with easy, compound words and then gradually working up to harder syllables.

The only puppet I had to introduce this concept was a leftover paper bag cat puppet that I had made with my kiddos last year. It was actually supposed to be a cat puppet that went along with the story "The Three Little Kittens". You know, the ones who lost their mittens?! But I thought I would give it a try...

The game was a BIG HIT!!! I named my cat puppet "Mum" just like my instructor had named hers Mum, and my kiddos literally fell in love with the thing. :) They did really well with their word and syllable deletion too because they loved how Mum would "eat" the words and syllables they weren't supposed to say.

On Monday, my kiddos got to make their own "Mum" puppets, as they called them. They were simply esctatic. They were thrilled that my Mum wouldn't be "lonely" anymore. :)

So when they arrived at school today, they went right to their Mum cat puppets to see if the glue was dry and the puppet ready to use. Honestly, I don't know what they were more excited about. Seeing their Mum puppets or seeing that a butterfly had finally emerged! Its a toss-up :)

Of course we had to play the word & syllable deletion game today with ALL our Mum puppets!