Phonological Awareness Activities

An important, and underlying, component of reading and spelling is phonological awareness. This involves being able to identify the sounds and syllables in words and then being able to manipulate those sounds. There are many programs and resources available to help develop phonological awareness:

• Sound Hearing
• HearBuilder
• Equipped for Reading Success

However, there are also many activities you can incorporate into your daily interactions with your child to help support and develop phonological awareness. The following ideas are listed in order of difficulty.

Early Phonological Awareness

Early phonological awareness involves rhyming, syllabification and initial sound identification. These skills typically develop in pre-schoolers and there is evidence that this early phonological knowledge facilitates the development of letter-sound knowledge.

Rhyming

Rhyming involves being able to recognise and create words that rhyme. This is one of the first skills that children develop.

• Read books that are written in rhyming verse (e.g., Dr Seus books, Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See?, etc., click here for a list). As children become familiar with the story, leave off the final word on each line for your child to say. Alternatively, together think of your own rhyming words.
• Teach your child nursery rhymes  (or for video versions ) and poems. Once they are familiar with the rhyme or poem, change the words to make it your own.
• Create and use a rhyming word sort.
• Slightly older students who are beginning to read can make and use onset and rime sliders. These don’t necessarily all need to result in real words and a part of the activity can be having the child determine whether or not a real word has been made.

Syllabification

Clapping Chants

• Once the clapping pattern has been established, children can add in the words.
• Teach children chants that involve clapping to the syllables. Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar is a good example.
• Most skipping chants are appropriate: https://elitejumps.co/blogs/guides/jump-rope-rhymes-songs
• Begin by having children develop a simple clapping pattern first.

Robot Talk

• Ask children to carry out a simple activity that includes some words with more than one syllable (e.g., stand up slowly, throw the basketball, open the window).
• Give the instruction to the children in a robotic voice in which the words are said syllable by syllable with a gap between each syllable (e.g., o-pen the win-dow E-liz-a-beth).
• Try to incorporate the concept during the day. For example: Fi-o-na, please set the ta-ble or Chris-to-pher please o-pen the win-dow).

Hoop or Cushion Jumping

• Say a word with two or more syllables.
• Children jump onto a cushion or into a hoop as they say each syllable in the word.

Initial Sound Identification

• Play ‘I Spy’ but say the sound the word starts with (not the letter name).
• Sort pictures according to the initial sound. See My Alphabet Book which has a collection of pictures which you could use for this activity.
• Together make up ‘tongue twisters’ with as many words as possible in the sentence beginning with the same sound.
• Make a game out of identifying the initial sound of objects in the environment (e.g., Say: ‘Table’ begins with….?)

Basic Phonological Awareness

Basic phonological awareness involving segmenting and blending and these skills typically develop throughout the first two years of formal schooling and are crucial skills in early decoding and encoding. There is evidence that blending develops before segmenting but that both skills need to be mastered to see benefits for reading development.

Blending

Once students have decoded a word according to its phonemes, then they need to be able to blend those individual phonemes together into a coherent word. Thus the ability to blend underpins decoding. Consequently, it is important that students participate in blending activities even before they begin learning to read.

Snail Talk

• Place several different objects or pictures in front of the student. Make sure they are objects that would be familiar to the student (e.g., sun, book, snake, ship, etc.).
• Have the student identify each object.
• Initially, use objects with only 3 to 4 phonemes. As the student progresses, the number of phonemes in the word can be increased.
• Sound out the name of one of the objects one phoneme at a time.
• The student attempts to identify the object.
• Initially, you may need to just ‘stretch-out’ the word (e.g., ssssuuunnnn). As the student becomes more competent increase the time between each individual phoneme (e.g., p…..e…..n). However, make sure the student can easily blend ‘stretched out’ words before separating the phonemes.
• It is also easier if the word begins with phonemes that are easily ‘stretched’ (e.g., m, s, f, etc.).
• If the student has difficulty identifying the word, even when it is ‘stretched out’, have the student copy you first.
• It can also be useful to a ‘phonic whisper phone’. Initially, you can say the sounds into one end of the whisper phone while the student listens with the other end of the phone placed next to their ear. The student can then copy you and listen to themselves saying the sounds.

Use Blocks or Counters

• Some students find it useful to have a visual representation of the sounds.
• Place a block or counter in front of the student as you say each sound in the word.
• Point to each block as you repeat the sounds.
• Help the student say the sounds as you both point to, or touch, the blocks.

I Spy

• Play I spy as usual except you sound out the words rather than giving descriptions.

Listen to This Word Song

• Teach students the following song which is sung to the tune of the Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star
  

• At the end of the song, the teacher says the sounds in the word and students blend the sounds and say the word.
• You could do a similar activity with ‘Old MacDonald had a Farm’ and instead of saying the name of the animal, it is sounded out.

Blending Slide

• A useful visual representation of blending is to place an eraser on a ruler which is held at a slight angle.
• As the rubber slides down the ruler, say the sounds in a word and then when it hits the table, say the whole word.

Segmenting

Segmenting involves being able to break a word into the individual phonemes (or sounds) in the word and this is particularly relevant for spelling.

I Spy & Snail Talk

• Use the same activities as described in the blending section, except instead of the teacher doing the segmentation, the students do it.

Cheer Leader Activity

• Say a word. Begin with words that only contain 2 or 3 phonemes and then gradually increase the number of phonemes as students become more competent.
• Then instruct students to give you the sounds in the word.
• Make it active by adding in actions. It could be as simple as throwing your hands in the air.
• Keep in mind that this is quite a difficult activity as it requires students to keep in their short-term memory the word sun, plus the sounds that have previously been said.
• To make it easier, after students have provided the first sound, the teacher can say, “Tell me the next sound in sun – s…..”. Then, “Tell me the next sound in sun – s-u….”

Break it Down

• If students are having difficulty segmenting a whole word, begin by seeing if they can focus on identifying just the first sound.
• Once they can identify the first sound of words easily, move onto identifying final sounds.
• If students are having difficulty identifying medial sounds, you can begin by using minimal pairs and having students identify whether the two words you say are the same or different (e.g., hat/hat, hat/heat, pin/pen, pen/pen).

Advanced Phonological Awareness

Advanced phonological awareness involves the manipulation of phonemes (e.g., deleting and substituting sounds). For typically developing students, this skills is still being mastered up until around the third or fourth year of schooling. It is this advanced phonological awareness that research is now indicating is needed for efficient sight word development (i.e., words that can be quickly and automatically recognised).

In addition to the resources mentioned at the beginning of the post, the following information activities might be beneficial.

• Alphabet Word Changes – Ask the child to read the first word. Before the card is moved to the next letter, cover the letter and ask the child what the next word will be if you change it to the next sound. For example, the first word might be ‘bin’. The next letter is ‘u’. Cover the ‘u’ and ask, “If you change /i/ to /u/ (make sure you say the sound and not the name of the letter) what will be the new word?” After the child provides the answer, they can move the slider and read the word to see if they were correct.
• Create a verbal word chain where each person takes it in turn to change one sound in a word to make a new word (e.g., cat-bat-bun-bug-but-hut…).
• Martian Talk: When you ask your child to do something, change one sound in one of the words. For example: Could you get the wilk out of the fridge. The child needs to work out that ‘wilk’ doesn’t make sense and then determine the word should actually be ‘milk’. Alternatively, you can just leave off a sound (e.g., say ‘ilk’).
• Play I Spy but the clue is saying the word with either a wrong sound or a sound missing (e.g., I spy with my little eye an ‘air’ – for ‘chair’ or ‘commuter’ for ‘computer’).

Reference
Kilpatrick, D. (2015). Essentials of Assessing, Preventing and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. John Wiley & Sons: NJ.