Final answer:
A first grade teacher using a song to teach about similar sounds is promoting students' phonemic awareness, essential for reading development. Songs and rhymes help in acoustic encoding of language, which supports reading and writing skills.
Step-by-step explanation:
When a first grade teacher is teaching her students a new song and asks one student to identify any words that have similar sounds, she is focusing on phonemic awareness. This approach helps students understand that words are made up of individual sounds, or phonemes, that can be manipulated and recognized. Through songs and rhymes, children learn to encode the acoustic properties of language, making the process of learning to read and write more intuitive. This teaching strategy is closely allied with phonics, where students learn to connect sounds with letters or groups of letters.
Activities like sorting words by sound, listening to the number of sounds in words, and practicing with vowel and consonant sounds all contribute to a child's phonemic development. This, in turn, is critical for developing effective decoding strategies and word identification strategies, which are necessary for reading fluency and comprehension. By engaging students in this type of auditory learning, the teacher is promoting their awareness of how the sounds within language work, setting a foundation for future reading skills.