Sound Recognition

In my last post, I showed you my classroom and today I'd like to 'talk' about reading, in particular how we get students to start recognizing the sounds they hear within written text (i.e. the sound 'o' can be eau or au or aux in French).  I think it goes without saying that listening skills and oral production skills need to be the largest emphasis in the younger grades.  After all, we all learned to talk long before we learned to read and then write.

Last year, I started doing 'la virelangue de la semaine' around March break with my primary students.  Students love them and began to find the sounds we were emphasizing in texts around the classroom, in the AIM play and in the books they had access to in my room.  This year, I want to take what students started doing naturally last year and turn it into an activity that they can do with our word wall words, or books.  For this fall, I have made an activity called Les feuilles phonologiques.

As I introduce/review sounds with them I will post trees around the room like the one above that have a letter combination on the trunk.  Students will then be able to grab leaves from a basket on the counter and add new words around the base of the tree.  Each student will also have their own recording sheet for their workbook that they are record their own personal word family trees. 

I am really hoping that students enjoy this activity and that it helps them recognize sounds within words. What do you think of this activity?  Do you have a system you use to teach them sound recognition?