Are you familiar with Charlotte Speech and Hearing Center’s APPLE a Day program? For the next few weeks on our blog, we are going to break down this program and talk about what APPLE stands for.
APPLE is an abbreviation for Auditory Comprehension, Print Knowledge, Phonological Awareness, and Language Expansion. We offer our APPLE a Day program to children age 3-5 in small groups and whole-group within their classroom. Further, our expert Speech-Language Pathologists use evidence-based strategies to focus on the development of key skills. These skills include phonological awareness, vocabulary development, language comprehension and oral expression.
Phonological Awareness
Now that you are familiar with the program, let’s talk about the second “P” in our APPLE a Day Program: Phonological Awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds in words and includes rhyming, syllables, and blending words.
Phonological awareness is another foundational skill needed in order to learn how to read. It allows us to have the ability to work with sounds in our language and manipulate them to make words and communicate! This is incredibly important when thinking about reading and spelling. If a child has difficulty recognizing sounds, they will struggle putting sounds together to form words and recognize words on paper.
Through our APPLE a Day program, a certified Speech-Language Pathologist will work with your child to understand, recognize, and manipulate sounds. Some examples of activities targeting phonological awareness are syllable segmentation, rhyming, and identifying initial sounds of words.
To see how our Speech-Language Pathologists target phonological awareness in the classroom, please watch our short video below! In addition, you can watch more of our helpful speech-language videos on our YouTube channel and Resources for Families page.
Finally, learn more about our APPLE a Day program by visiting https://charlottespeechhearing.com/speech-language-services/community-based-services/.
Blog and video by Michelle Knoud, M.S., CCC-SLP. Michelle is a Speech-Language Pathologist at Charlotte Speech and Hearing Center.