This post is long overdue! Phonemic awareness is a huge part of my curriculum. I wanted to share with you some things I do with my students to strengthen their phonemic awareness.
My introduction to phonemic awareness:
When I was a new teacher, I used to tutor over the summer. I was tutoring a student who was going to be in first grade. She had finished kindergarten knowing all of her letters and sounds, but not yet blending words together. I sat down with her and after five minutes I started sweating!
I had my handy dandy magnetic letters ready to go. I put out three letters to make a CVC word. Here’s what I got: “/k/ /aaaaa/ /t/…. tap!” Huh? Okay, let’s try this again. I sounded it out with her. Still no cat. So I tried another and another. Then I tried just two sounds. She would give me words that were close and sometimes words that weren’t even in the ballpark. I’m pretty sure I got turtle for rat.
What I didn’t know then is that she was lacking phonemic awareness skills. She knew her letters and sounds, but could not blend the sounds together to read the words. The same was true for spelling. She couldn’t break up a word into its individual sounds in order to spell the word. Phonemic awareness skills need to be developed before reading can take place.
A Personal Story: (You can skip this if you want to get to the goods)
You have all seen my son on this blog before. He often tries things out for me now. Last year, I was so excited to start teaching him to read. He mastered his letters and sounds super early so I thought reading would be easy for him. Nope. He so easily memorized letters when he was 2 and “sight words” when he was four. I didn’t want to push him before he was ready, but he seemed ready because of these things.
So I jumped right into CVC words. He really couldn’t do it. So I stopped and waited. He was young, so there was no need to push. His brain could memorize words but not blend sounds together. Still, it was early. But then we were playing a game with his little brother when I discovered he could not even rhyme! He had just turned five. Now I was worried. Rhyming is supposed to be one of the earlier phonological skills. How did I miss this?! I realized he did in fact lack several phonological awareness skills. I guess I thought he’d get it naturally. We’ve read to him since birth and we have our fair share of rhyming books. The reality is although it comes naturally for many children, it does not for all. Many children need to explicit instruction and more practice to develop these skills.
To wrap up my long story, I got to work. After he developed that phonemic awareness, he was ready to sound out words using print (a.k.a. phonics). He had the two components: letter knowledge and phonemic awareness to actually blend the words. We need to do this for our students too. Make sure they have the phonemic awareness first- then move to phonics (decoding and encoding).
What is Phonemic Awareness
Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up words. For example, the word “chick” has 3 phonemes and the word flip has 4 phonemes.
Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual phonemes (sounds). When a child has phonemic awareness, he or she can hear and manipulate the individual sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is auditory and does not involve print.
Phonics is the study of the sound-symbol relationship (sounds and their corresponding letter or letters). Phonemic awareness is a precursor to phonics. Phonics does involve print.
Why is Phonemic Awareness Important?
Children need to be able to hear the sounds in words before they can begin to read or write them. When they are sounding out a word, they need to be able to blend those sounds together. They may know the letter-sound relationship and be able to sound out: /k/ /a/ /t/. They must have phonemic awareness in order to blend those sounds together to read the word “cat”.
When spelling words, a child needs to be able to do the opposite. They must segment, or break apart, the sounds of the word. For some kids, those skills come more naturally. For many children, the ability to blend and segment words needs to be taught and practiced with guidance.
Several studies show that phonemic awareness is a key indicator of reading success.
Examples of Phonemic Awareness
- Grouping words by similar sounds: Ball, bear, and bike all start with /b/.
- Isolating Sounds: Identifying the first, middle, and last sounds in words.
- Blending sounds into words: /w/ /i/ /sh/= wish
- Segmenting words: wish has 3 phonemes and is broken up this like: /w/ /i/ /sh/
- Manipulate sounds within words: Change the /w/ to /d/. What word? dish
You can get a printable version of this here.
Now onto the goods. Here are some activities that we enjoyed doing together.
Fun Phonemic Awareness Activities:
Stretching Sounds with a Slinky
I do this with my kindergarten small groups every day. There are three ways we do this:
- I use the slinky to stretch a word and they guess the word. (They are blending sounds).
- I give them a word and they stretch the sounds with the slinky (they are segmenting)
- Make it a game: One student gets a picture card. They segment the word with the slinky and the group guesses the word.
Click here for a video.
Right after this, I call on a classmate to guess his word. This game never gets old!
Using Connecting Cubes
I know what you’re thinking. Sarah, these are the same activities just with different manipulatives. Yep, you got it! Repetition for our students is good. They think they are doing something different when you put something new in their hands.
You can do this same activity with syllables or with onset and rime.
“Pushing” Phonemes with Manipulatives
I use this one the most. You’ve seen it before. You can use anything to push the sounds: pennies, pom-poms, mini-erasers math counters, etc. I like to change it up seasonally, too. You can use acorns in the fall, little hearts in February, and white pom-poms for snowballs in the winter.
I use these with my small groups every day! I say a word and my students “push” the sounds. Then, I ask the group to point out certain sounds.
- For example: If you break up the word shop, then you ask question like, “Which color says /p/?” and “What sound was the blue chip?”
It’s a great warm-up to small group instruction.
After they are proficient with segmenting and blending, you can start manipulating sounds. For example, you can take away the green and say, “I’m taking away /sh/ in ship and adding in /ch/” (put another chip in its place).
Add in a Puppet
This is a favorite! Get a favorite stuffed animal or little puppet. I got this idea from this amazing teacher I worked with years ago in North Carolina. Get your little puppet or stuffy.
Tell your students that he speaks a slow language and you need help figuring out what he is saying.
Ask questions like, “What is your favorite color?” Have your puppet answer, “/r/ /e/ /d/”. A little dramatic flare gets their attention. “What?! I can’t understand you! Say it again.” Have your puppet do it again. Then call on a student to “translate” for you.
Smash It
This is always a fan favorite! Click HERE for the video.
Bead Slide
I already blogged about this a few days ago, but I wanted to include it here, too.
Get Moving
Hop out the sounds of a word! The more movement the better, right? This video shows jumping on spots, but you can just jump in place. Click here for a video. (Sorry, it’s a bit blurry!) In this video, I used SitSpots. They can be easily moved around the classroom.
Tracking Sounds:
I have all these trains and tracks since I have two boys. I’m putting them to use! LOL!
In this video, I’m showing you different ways to use this track:
- Isolating sounds
- Segmenting Sounds
- Manipulating Sounds
Phonemic Awareness Resources
I made a little “take-home” kit for some of the parents at my school. I ended up using these in my own classroom. The cards have ideas for parents and teachers on each card. You’ll only need to add a few extras to go with this.
You can see more about this kit here:
I also have a huge pack of activities for RTI and small groups. These are hands-on activities. You can find this here.
Update: Now with Google Slides!
And this is similar to the pack above except it is ALL print and go. No laminating and no color. You can find this here.
There is also a bundle of all three. You can find these here.
I also have another detailed blog post about phonemic awareness here. There are several tips on how to teach phonological awareness for the whole class.
