Home Early Learning Play School (HELPS) 1

Home Early Learning Play School (HELPS) 1 – Spy Mission 1, Tools, Secret Codes, Code Book, Reporting, & Speech Secrets:

Action Plan 1: Phonemic awareness and phonics, starting as early as 18 to 24 months old. Besides reading to your child daily, ask questions about the pictures and story. Show a love of books. Discussion of hard sounds, g, k and what to do. Discussion of a forward-thrusting tongue, r, s, f, th, and what to do – especially by 4 or 5 years old. Practice writing letters as outlined. Discover the Secret Codes (spy game).   Phonics Chart 1 (see appendix). Secret Code Rule 1.

TGM picture-letters and stories tap into all different types of learning: left-brained logic with the letters and sounds, right-brained imagination with the colorful enchanting pictures, kinesthetic learning by touching the letters while saying the sounds, and rhyming- which is one of the easiest ways to remember things. You can also help your child make letter cookies out of dough, use 3-D magnetic letters, color-code vowels versus consonants, and so many things to involve all the senses, even smells. But first and foremost importantly, the picture-letters and their sounds, sounds, sounds!

Spy Game – The Secret Codes:
                Spy Mission 1: Discover what the squiggly lines mean.
                You (child) are the world-famous spy, Cody Breaker! Your first mission is to find out what all the squiggly lines on the pages mean. Are they drawings? Sounds? Which squiggly line means which sound? Have the Spy Chief (mom or dad) use the Spy Tools and Spy Code Book to help you decipher the strange code. Report to the Spy Chief regularly about what you have found (parents, as the child learns each sound, ask her to find all of the “ă – apples” on the page, billboard, etc.)

Spy Tools:
                Spy Chief, start using The Godfrey Method picture-letters found in the appendix with your child. They are recommended for children ages two to six years, but you can start introducing them even younger. If you prefer color instead of these black-and-white pictures, get A Pretty Girl Was Alpha Bette or A Funny Boy Was Prince River books. Follow the guidelines in the Spy Code Book to use these picture-letters properly. Taught the right way, they are a simple, very effective way to link letters and sounds, and the child never forgets. They are like nothing else, and never cause a ‘prompt-dependent’ issue the way other methods might.

Spy Code Rule 1: The qu rule: q usually has u, and qu says ‘kw’ together.

Spy Code Book:
                The Spy Code Book is found in the appendix. The Spy Chief must follow it for vital mission success. The rationale and tips for each point are given there. The main points are:

·       Only teach the letter sounds, one sound per letter, not the letter names.
·        Only teach the lower-case letters, not the upper-case (capital) letters.
·       Start TGM phonics as young as 18-24 months, without waiting until the child is older, can talk, goes to     preschool, etc.
·    Teach words only by sounding-out, never by sight-reading.
·    Start making small words early, without waiting to finish all of the alphabet letter sounds.
·    Spend fun, quality time teaching TGM phonics at home, without waiting for the preschools or schools to do it.
·    Have no control issues or power struggles about phonics with your child, never demanding your child to respond.
·         Raise your child’s vocabulary by using normal language, never baby talk.
·         Include touching with phonics instruction, not just the seeing and hearing senses.

      Follow The Godfrey Method as given in the Spy Code Book, never leaving it up to the child to ‘discover’ reading on his own.

Spy Reporting:
                Show your spy (child), Cody Breaker, how to report what s/he has found by writing the letters s/he has learned so far. To truly understand the code, s/he must master writing the code him/herself. Practice two or three letters each session. Use the Century Gothic font as your letter-shape guideline. For example, a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z is the easiest style to learn to write.

                It is very important to have your child write the letters from left to right. The order of writing each letter is crucial to learning the orientation of each. For example, to write the letter b you draw the line first and then the circle. But for the letter d you write the circle first and then the line. This helps set the different direction of b vs. d, as well as p vs. q in the child’s mind. And it’s the way we write in cursive, forming all letters from left to right, in a continuous flow, as we write each word. Learning cursive by age 8 is a great way for children to remember letter orientation.

                Most handwriting print methods teach us to write all lines from top to bottom. However, it sets in a child’s mind better if those with tall lines start at the bottom and go up, like b d f h k l t, to more easily differentiate them from those that have tails below. For g j p q y, start the line at the top and go down (same for all the short letters, a c e i m n o r s u v w x z). Starting at the bottom or top helps differentiate b vs. p, as well as d vs. q. It also helps with all orientations and sizes above or below the main line. Again, this is how we write in cursive, with lines starting from bottom to top for tall letters, and from top to bottom for tails on letters. It is much easier to see how letters orient in written space this way.

Spy Speech Secrets for Spy Chiefs:
                If your little spy is over age three and still has problems with hard sounds like, g and k, here’s the secret of what to do. Gently hold the front tip of your child’s tongue down with your clean thumb while having him say g and k sounds. This will strengthen the back muscles of his tongue and show him how to use them for certain sounds. The back of the tongue has to learn how to rise up and touch the roof of the mouth in back.

                If your little spy is over age three and still has problems with a forward-thrusting tongue and confuses the sounds of s, f, and th, here’s what to do. Place one mini-M&M candy (or Skittle, etc.) behind your child’s upper, front teeth barely above the inner gum line. Have her hold it there with the tip of her tongue for a few seconds or minutes, as long as possible. Make a game of it. Doing this regularly will strengthen her tongue’s muscles and help it learn not to thrust forward all the time. Also having her practice saying s-s-s-s-s with her upper and lower teeth shut together. It will help her start hearing and feeling the difference between s and th sounds.

                Sometimes speech problems are a hearing-processing problem in the brain. If I asked one child to say ‘thirsty,’ she would always say ‘firsty.’ But if I asked her to say ‘super,’ she would say ‘thuper.’  So I asked her to say ‘sirsty,’ and she said ‘thirsty.’ Saying the sound was not a tongue-muscle problem but a processing problem. She was not hard of hearing, but struggled with interpreting the different sounds. This can be a precursor of dyslexia, which is a hearing-processing problem, not a seeing problem. Learning phonics and sounding-out words cured her speech problem, preventing any future learning disability.

                When children struggle with the r sound, they are saying it with the back of their tongue rising. Many other languages (like French) and the American East Coast say it that (soft-r) way. To say it correctly the common American (hard-r) way, the front tip of the tongue should be raised just behind the upper teeth, almost touch the roof of the mouth. Have your child practice making motorcycle sounds by vibrating his tongue up in that same spot where a mini-M&M would be held (see above), r-r-r-r-r-r. Practice the difference with saying a soft-r in back vs. a hard-r in front of your tongue.

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