We’re on the Auditory system right now and we started off with an appropriate example. Loud music playing, the teacher welcoming students back from recess, telling them to take out a worksheet, explaining what their homework is going to be and so on. Easy to see how overwhelming it can be.
Anatomy 101: The Ear. I’m flashing back to elementary/high school science, when we learned all about the hearing system and the inner ear. You know, the three bones in the ear that allow you to hear. Good to know that it all seems familiar still after all these years.
The auditory system is responsible for phonemic awareness skills. It’s a fundamental skill for reading and if there are auditory issues, then students will have trouble identifying the individual phonemes in words. Auditory discrimination is the ability to discriminate differences in individual letter sounds in words. One activity for this is to introduce three words daily, 12 weekly. Point out similar sounding words. “Launch, lunch” Don’t let kids see your lips though, because you want it to be just off of auditory cues.
Interesting study on the screen right now by Hart and Risley. Children from professional families had 2153 words per hour spoken to the child, and the child’s vocabulary was about 1116 words. Children from low income families had 653 words spoken to them per hour and had vocabularies of around 500 words. No surprise, I’d love to hear more from the study.
They’re recommending that you have music playing 30% of the time in the classroom and also that you turn down the bass so you stimulate the development of the higher frequencies. It also allows students to hear the lyrics better. Wouldn’t have thought of that one. Going to try that one later in the car.