Identity of Phonemes:
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Introduce the phoneme with a semantic representation.
Demonstrate the production of the phoneme (mouth shape, tongue, etc.).
Sound repetition activities (iteration) help children begin working toward full
segmentation by isolating the first sound in a word. Eg. K-K-K- Katie. Popular songs
may be modified by the teacher to include iterations, e.g Pop Goes the Weasel – last
line could be p-p-p-p-Pop goes the weasel!
Use any popular melody and sing it using that sound as the lyrics. (eg. London Bridge
sung as /b/-/b/-/b/-/b/...
Learn an alliterative tongue twister featuring the phoneme. (Peter Piper)
Use a puppet to isolate the initial phoneme in the alliterative words. (bear says blue
berries and black berries in the bushes... brown, black...)
Stretch the phoneme to explore its articulation, using an elastic band or a
stretchable action figure as a visual demonstration.
Isolate the phoneme in the final (or medial for vowels) position of other example
words.
Practice sound-to-word matching for the target phoneme, first as a yes/no game
(e.g. "Do you hear /n/ in next?"), and then as a forced choice (e.g. "Do you hear /n/
in old or new?)
Listen for the sound in stories, poems, or songs.
Find objects in the room that have that sound.
Use different voices to produce the sound (e.g. baby, troll, queen, tyrannosaurus...)
Categorize or sort pictures based on beginning or ending sounds.
Note: Teach the sixteen consonants that have only one sound first: b, d, f, h, j, k, l, m, n, p,
q, r, t, v, x, z; then the c, g, s, w, y. Follow this with the vowels: sometimes they say their
own names, and other times they have a short sound. Next, the digraphs that have two
letters for one sound: ch, sh, th, wh.
Rhyming Words:
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Rhyme Game: Model rhyming first, by saying, "I can rhyme a word with /at/ that
begins with /f/. Can you tell me what it is?" Fat. "I can rhyme a word with /at/ that
begins with /s/. Can you tell me what it is?
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Initial rhyme recognition can be reinforced by direct modeling of instances (noserose) and non-instances (bed-car) of rhyming word pairs. To make a game of this,
use a happy face symbol for a rhyming pair and a sad face symbol for non-rhyming
pair; or a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It is important to have the children repeat
the rhyming pairs to reinforce the verbal production of rhymed words.
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Pictures can be used as visual cues for rhyme recognition activities and can be used
during the modeling phase of instruction. The teacher can present 3 pictures and
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ask the child to select and say the two that rhyme. A variation would be to display
two nonrhyming pictures and have the child select the one that rhymes with a word
being said by the teacher.
Odd Word Out is a game in which the teacher presents four words, three of which
rhyme, and the child determines which word is the odd one that doesn't belong with
the others. (e.g. zveed, bead, pill, seed)
Rhyming Pair Concentration: Name the pictures out loud. Find two that rhyme.
Snap and Clap Rhymes: Begin with a simple clap and snap rhythm. Get more complex
as children move along in rhyming. Clap Clap Snap fall Clap Clap Snap ball
Clap Clap Snap hall Clap Clap Snap small
A variation is the "I say, you say..." game: I say fat. You say ___. I say red. You say
___.
Rhyming Word Sit Down: Children walk around in a big circle taking one step each
time a rhyming word is said by the teacher. When the teacher says a word that
doesn't rhyme, the children sit down: she, tree, flea, spree, key, bee, sea, went
Rhyming words in songs, poems and big books: As you do shared reading with the
students, pause at the end of phrases and let the students supply the rhyming
words. After you have read the poem together, ask the children to find the rhyming
words. Generate other words that rhyme with these rhyming words.
Silly Rhymes Big Book: Use rimes (roots of word families) and rhyme charts around
the classroom to create silly poems with the class. Write the one line rhyme with
the whole class in big letters on large chart paper. Read aloud several times. Use
different voices. Have children sound and clap words. Have a child illustrate the
rhyme. Repeat each week for another set of rimes.
Some rhyming patterns to start with: at (s, f, m, r), ip (z, l, r, sh), an (f, m, r, v), eat
(f, m, n, s, h), et (s, v, m, n), ock (l, r, s), ick (s, l, th, t), ay (l, r, s, p), ee (m, s, b, t),
ame (f, n, g, t), an (f, c, v, p), ed (b, f, r, l), ag (b, n, s, r), ick (k, l, p, s), all (b, c, f, t),
ell (b, s, f, sh), ine (d, f, m, sh), ack (b, j, qu, t), and (b, h, l, s).
Sound Matching Activities:
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Children are asked to decide which of several words begins with a given sound or to
generate a word beginning with a particular sound (can use picture cards or small
objects). You may ask for a specific sound like /s/; you may ask students to
generate their own examples of words beginning with the sound like /s/. Teachers
say the phoneme sounds not the letter names.
Word to word matching: Do pen and pipe begin with the same sound?
Blending Activities:
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Blending requires children to manipulate individual sounds by combining them to form
a word. Given a series of isolated sounds (e.g. /b/-/a/-/t/), children blend them
together (e.g., bat)
Guessing Game: Yopp (1992b) "What am I thinking of?" This game encourages
children to blend orally spoken sounds together. The teacher tells the children a
category and then speaks in a segmented fashion the sounds of a particular item in
that category. For eg. category of clothing – sounds may be /h/-/a/-/t/ Children’s
attempts to blend the sounds together are applauded and the game continues.
Eventually, children become the leaders and take turns providing their peers with
segmented words for blending. Categories may include theme words as an extension
of integrated literacy experiences.
Use picture cards with pictures turned away until children have guessed the picture
Use a grab bag, peeking inside and saying, "I see a toy /d/-/u/-/k/ in here. Who
knows what I see?"
Use the lyrics to "If You’re Happy" substituting the words "If you think you know
this word, shout it out!"
Pronounce the sounds individually (the slow way) in a word and ask the child to say
the word the fast way. Listen: f-oo-t-b-a-ll is the slow way and football is the fast
way. Now your turn. Here is the slow way, can you say it the fast way?
Blend onsets and rimes: model blending an initial sound onto a word by using a jingle,
"It starts with /l/ and it ends with /ight/, put it together and it says light." When
they have the idea, the children supply the final word. An element of excitement can
be created by using children's names for this activity and asking each child to
recognize and say his/her own name when it is presented, "It starts with /b/ and it
ends with etsy, put it together and it says Betsy."
Have a puppet who speaks "funny" by saying words syllable by syllable, or phoneme
by phoneme for the children to figure out. The puppet can have children guess, /f//i/-/sh/ ... I said fish! or tri-cer-a-tops ... I said triceratops!
Sound Isolation Activities:
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Children are given a word, picture, or object and asked to tell what sound occurs at
the beginning, middle, or end of the word.
Sound Snacks (A Tasty Game): Place two paper cups on a table next to a bowl of
peanuts, M & M's, raisins, cheerios, or whatever snack you want to have. Label one
cup "B" for beginning and the other "E" for ending. As the child to identify the
beginning or ending consonants in words you name by placing one piece of snack in
the correct cup. Eg. "Where is the /t/ sound in wet?" (End), "Where is the /b/
sound in bed?" (Beginning). Children may eat the snack if they put it in the correct
cup. Some words like pop, treat, tent, Mom will allow the children to put a treat in
both cups and eat more than one treat at a time.
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Show the children a picture (dog) and asking the children to identify the correct
word out of three: "Is this a /mmmm/-og, a /d/d/d/-og, or a /sssss/-og?" A
variation is to ask if the word has a particular sound: "Is there a /d/ in dog? This
can be switched to "Which sound does dog start with- /d/, /sh/, or /l/? This
sequence encourages the children to try out the three onsets with the rime to see
which one is correct.
Phoneme counting:
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How many sounds do you hear in the word cake?
To count syllables in words, activities can be used such as clapping hands, tapping
the desk, or marching in place to the syllables in children's names (Ma-ry), items in
the immediate environment (win-dow), or words from a favorite story (wi-shy, washy).
Clap your hands or tap finger on the back of your other hand to mark each sound or
syllable heard.
Take One Thing From the Box: Collect a number of objects in a box or bag, making
sure that the numer of syllables in the name differ. A child selects an object, name
it (e.g., pencil). All of the children should repeat the object's name as they clap out
its syllables. Then ask how many syllables were heard. A variation would be to use
pictures.
Deleting phonemes:
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What sound do you hear in meat that is missing in eat?
I can make a new word from flat by taking out the /l/ sound? Can you guess what it
is?
I can take the /k/ sound out of monkey and make a new word. Can you tell me what it
is?
I can change the last sound of a word to make a new word: take the /p/ off the end
of map and put a /d/ sound intead. Can any one tell me what the new word is?
Play a game of "sound take-away". The teacher models how to orally segment a word
into the "target" sound plus everything else and then takes the sound away. A
modified jingle can be used: "Chair. It starts with /ch/ and it ends with air; take the
first sound away and it says air." The jingle can be used until the children can delete
sounds with a simple prompt: "Say ball without the /b/".
Children who have difficulty with deleting sounds might benefit from visual clues. By
placing two colored blocks side-by-side, the teacher can designate one as
representing the target sound and the other as representing the remainder of the
word: "I'm going to use these blocks to say moon. This (red block) says moo and this
yellow block says /n/. The child is then asked what the first block said when the
second block is removed.
Odd word out:
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What word starts with a different sound: bag, nine, beach, bike?
Have three of four objects that start with the same sound. Have children identify
the objects, so everyone uses the same labels and exaggerate the initial sounds.
Sing/say the Sesame Street jingle, "One of these things just doesn't belong here,
one of things is just not the same. Can you tell which thing just doesn't belong here?
Before I finish this game?"
Sound to word matching:
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Is there a /k/ in bike?
Use songs in sound matching activities, e.g. Old Macdonald Had a Farm: What's the
sound that starts these words? Turtle, time and teeth. (wait... for children's
response) /t/ is the sound that starts these words: Turtle, time and teeth. With a
/t/t/ here and a /t/t/ there, Here a /t/, there a /t/, everywhere a /t/t/. /t/ is the
sound that starts these words; turtle, time and teeth. The children might use
favorite stories from their reading lessons to identify different sets of three
words that start with the same sound to incorporate into the song. Each repeated
verse could then emphasize a different sound.
Make a set of dominoes that have two pictured objects on each card. The children
are required to join cards sharing beginning (or ending) sounds.
A version of "snap: uses cards having one picture. The children take turns drawing a
card from a face-down pile and placing it on a face-up pile. When a newly drawn
card has the same beginning (or end) sound as the top card in the face-up pile, the
first child to identify the match by saying "snap" collects the pile.
Sound bingo uses bingo cards with pictures that the children mark if one of their
pictures has the same beginning (or ending) sound as the word said by the caller.
Segmentation Activities: Segmenting the sounds in a word is one of
the more difficult of phonemic awareness tasks to perform (Yopp, 1988), yet it is highly
related to later success in decoding words. Segmenting refers to the act of isolating the
sounds in a spoken word.
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Pronounce a word and tell the children give an example of the slow way. For example,
football (fast way) and f-oo-t-b-a-ll (slow way). Give the children another word eg.
bed and ask if they can say it the slow way (b-e-d).
One idea is to display a picture of a train composed of an engine, passenger car, and
a caboose. Three connecting boxes can be drawn under each component. Explain that
words have beginning, middle, and end sounds just like the train has a beginning,
middle and end. Demonstrate by slowly articulating a CVC (consonant, vowel,
consonant) word (e.g. /p/-/i/-/g/) and pointing to the box corresponding to the
position of each sound in the word.
Use interlocking blocks as a visual demonstration of segmentation.
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Children’s Names: Draw out the first sound and exaggerate so as to draw attention
to the sound, e.g. C-C-C-Catherine, or Llllllllllllll-inda. Students may even begin to
guess which child you are calling by the initial sound.
Use Twinkle, Twinkle melody replacing with the following words: Listen, listen, to my
word. Tell me all the sounds you heard: race. (slowly) /r/ is one sound, /a/ is two, /s/
is last in race, it’s true. (ask how many?)
Concrete Objects: Elkonin boxes have been used in Reading Recovery to help low
achieving readers focus on the sounds in words (Clay, 1985). A series of connected
boxes are drawn across the page. The number of boxes corresponds to the number
of sounds in a target word. The word chick is represented by three boxes. As the
teacher slowly says the word, she/he models moving an object, such as a chip, into
each box (l-r) as each sound is articulated. Ultimately, the moving of chips into the
boxes is replaced by writing of letters in the boxes (chick: /ch/-/i/-/ck/).
Note: When working with the segmentation of entire words, it is best to use words of no
more than three sounds (phonemes) as this is the most difficult task for young children.
General Phonological Manipulation:
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Language games that teach children to identify rhyming words and to create rhymes
on their own.
Activities that help children understand that spoken sentences are made up of
groups of separate words, that words are made up of syllables, and that words can
be broken down into separate sounds.
"Word play" activities in which children change beginning, middle, or ending letters
of related words, thus changing the words they decode and spell.
Introduction of phonetically "irregular" words in practice activities and stories. that this is
the fast way to say the word, and