LETTER FREE PHONICS

## Description

This app will give your child phonemic awareness skills.

Research shows that phonemic awareness is a powerful predictor of success for learning how to read (Stanovich, 1986; 1993; Share & Stanovich, 1995).

Letter Free Phonics will help prepare your child to read by helping your child learn the primary sounds of the letters of the alphabet.

Letter Free Phonics gives a solid foundation for your child to learn the alphabetic principle.

Letter Free Phonics will help your child identify the beginning sounds of words.

Letter Free Phonics will help your child understand that words are made up of sound units (phonemes).

Children with high phonemic awareness outperformed those with low phonemic awareness on all literacy measures, whether they were taught using a traditional basal instruction or whole language (Griffith, Klesius, & Kromrey, 1992).

The purpose of Letter Free Phonics is to help build foundational reading skills for your child. This app helps your child develop their ability to listen for and discern sounds at the beginnings of words. An example of this would be the child recognizing that the /b/ sound is at the beginning of the words ball, bat and balloon. By practicing and mastering the games in this app, your child can develop neural pathways in their brain relating to sound recognition. When your child is introduced to the printed letters, your child will already recognize the primary sound each letter makes. This will make learning the alphabet easier than if no phonemic instruction were given to your child.

The title of this app was chosen specifically to let users know that no letters would be used in the mechanics of app gameplay. This app focuses on helping children develop pre-letter skills of phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is an often overlooked or neglected skill that can greatly benefit early childhood reading skills. Many children are not given the much-needed explicit instruction of the SOUNDS that the letters make. In this app, only the SOUNDS of the letters are used and NEVER the letters or the names of the letters. This app is dedicated to helping children learn the sounds and function of letters.

The first two games of this app are to introduce the sounds of the letters indirectly while your child does two different types of puzzles. Each time a piece is moved correctly, the app will say the sound that is at the beginning of the featured image- the /c/ sound at the beginning of the word, cat. The combination of a letter sound with an image is designed to train your child's ear and brain to recognize and associate each image with its corresponding beginning sound. This is to introduce to your child the understanding of how words are made up of sounds.

The third game of this app has the child discerning which images begin with the featured sound. The child needs to decide which three of the seven images displayed begin with the /d/ sound (doll, dish and diver are good, but car, hat, fish and vest are bad).

In the fourth game, the child analyzes which of the image/sound pairings is a match. For example, for the pairing of /h/ hand or /h/ peach, the child will drag the token to the /h/ hand.