alphabet

Schwa – The Undercover Vowel.

6 days after we said goodbye to April, Shikha had to have surgery on his paw to remove a foreign body (which didn’t turn out to be there after all!) He kept walking around shaking his leg, trying to get rid of the yellow bandage with smiley faces on it. It lasted all of 24 hours. He said It Didn’t Make Him Feel Like Smiling and he Wasn’t Putting Up With It Any Longer.

Jj is for Jottings 46.  Schwa – the Undercover Vowel.

There’s a sneaky little vowel which we say many times every day and are probably quite unaware of it.  Its name is “schwa”, its phonetic symbol is /ə/, and it sounds like a little grunt.  It’s the undercover vowel because Continue reading →

Sticky Post

Welcome.

educatingalpacas.com supports the book “Aa is for Alpacas”.  See Why This Book?

Welcome to my blog – Educating Alpacas.  Does this mean that we are educating the alpacas – teaching them to count and so on – or are the alpacas helping to educate people?  Although we do a little bit of educating the alpacas (see blog post “Halter-Training April), it is mainly that the alpacas are involved in helping to educate both adults and children. The starting point for this blog is my book “Aa is for Alpacas”, written out of desperation at being unable to find an accurate alphabet book which measured up to my standards and which I could recommend to parents to help teach sound-letter links i.e. the sound made by each letter of the alphabet.  You cannot rely on this happening at school and, even if it does, children need to practise at home.

It is not only the lack of knowledge of sound-letter links which is tripping up children in the early stages of learning to read, but there are many other issues which I have observed during more than 35 years of working as a speech pathologist in education – issues which have arisen during this time and which are contributing to a decline in literacy in Australian children.  These concerns are shared by experienced teachers.  Via the medium of the blog and its accompanying Facebook page I set out to bring up issues which are affecting children’s learning, many of which may not have occurred to parents; some strategies for parents to implement with their children at home; pictures and anecdotes about the alpacas and their animal friends and neighbours; and any other vaguely-related issues which I feel moved to bring to people’s attention.

Since “Aa is for Alpacas” was the starting point for the blog, there are references made to both the animals in the book and to the information presented in the User Guide.  This is the only alphabet book that I am aware of which has a comprehensive guide for adults reading with the children, and it also has a book-reading (click on the Video button at the top of this page) so that adults can check whether they are saying sounds correctly and not confusing the children with letter names.  The book is aimed at 3-7 year olds, but can easily be used as a remedial tool for older children.

The Book Launch. This was in an educational supplies shop, Chalk and Chat, in Albury (New South Wales). Our shearer and his wife very kindly brought along two young, very well-behaved, alpacas for the children to meet.

 

 

Frequent Errors Made by Primary School Children.

Sam’s had enough and Marshmallow is starting to make her move.

Jj is for Jottings 13. Frequent Errors Made by Early to Mid Primary Children (and, when I come to think about it, secondary students as well because one flows on to the other – of course).
In list form:
1. Using capital letters mixed in with lower case. I recommend a good alphabet book to fix this – “Aa is for Alpacas”, for example(!) For some reason using B rather than b is common, even in the middle of a word. Continue reading →

Quick – and Alarming – Statistics.

Meet Sam’s friend, Marshmallow – a bantam with plenty of attitude. You’ll see a little sequence over the next few posts. She’s in the distance, admittedly, but there’ll be a close-up later on. Sam is eating some dried food.

Jj is for Jottings 12: Some quick statistics.
An Australian study done in 2010 found that 20% of 4-5 year old children were assessed as having a speech impairment.
Following on from that a separate study showed that, from a sample of parents who had expressed concerns about their child’s ability to talk and produce speech sounds, 60.4% did not attempt to access any speech pathology services. In fact they did nothing about it at all. Continue reading →

More Repetition

A perfect day in the front paddock. Note the crimson rosellas in the tree.

 

Jj is for Jottings 2.  More Repetition.

In “the olden days” much time in school was spent rote-learning all sorts of facts and figures – a room full of children standing up chanting the facts over and over. “That’s no way to teach/learn”, we think. I think (and observe) that the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Continue reading →