Seven aspects and three strands
Phase One activities are arranged under the following seven aspects.
Aspect 1: General sound discrimination – environmental sounds
Aspect 2: General sound discrimination – instrumental sounds
Aspect 3: General sound discrimination – body percussion
Aspect 4: Rhythm and rhyme
Aspect 5: Alliteration
Aspect 6: Voice sounds
Aspect 7: Oral blending and segmenting
Activities within the seven aspects are designed to help children:
1. listen attentively;
2. enlarge their vocabulary;
3. speak confidently to adults and other children;
4. discriminate phonemes;
5. reproduce audibly the phonemes they hear, in order, all through the word;
6. use sound-talk to segment words into phonemes.
The ways in which practitioners and teachers interact and talk with children are critical to developing children’s speaking and listening. This needs to be kept in mind throughout all phase one activities.