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Click HERE to join the Zoom workshop at 9am on May 19th

Or you can go to the Zoom website and enter our Meeting ID and Passcode there.

Meeting ID:  868 3859 1877
Passcode:  123456

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University of Oregon's Center on Teaching & Learning

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University of Oregon's Center on Teaching & Learning

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Sequencing Phonemic Awareness

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Instruction
Sequencing Phonemic Awareness Skills

Phonemic awareness instruction typically spans two years, kindergarten and first grade. Oral activities in kindergarten focus on simple tasks such as rhyming, matching words with beginning sounds, and blending sounds into words. In first grade, phonemic awareness tasks are more advanced, focusing on blending ("Blend these sounds together "mmmm-aaaa-nnnn), segmentation ("What are the sounds in man?), and the substitution and manipulation of phonemes (e.g., Change the first sound in man to /r/. What word do you have?").

Phonemic Awareness Development Continuum

Examples of Phonemic Awareness Skills

Sound and Word discrimination: What word doesn't belong with the others: "cat", "mat", "bat", "ran"? "ran"

Rhyming: What word rhymes with "cat"? bat

Syllable splitting: The onset of "cat" is /k/, the rime is /at/

Blending: What word is made up of the sounds /k/ /a/ /t/? "cat"

Phonemic segmentation: What are the sounds in "cat"? /k/ /a/ /t/

Phoneme deletion: What is "cat" without the /k/? "at"

Phoneme manipulation: What word would you have if you changed the /t/ in cat to an /n/? "can"

Curriculum Maps

Phonemic awareness skills can be taught in a particular sequence that maximizes student understanding and instructional efficiency. Phonemic awareness is only taught in kindergarten and first grade. By the end of first grade, students should have a firm grasp of phonemic awareness.

Curriculum maps list specific skills that relate to each big idea. Each skill can be taught during at an optimal time during the school year.

Click here for an explanation of how to read curriculum maps.

TIP: Go to the Curriculum Maps page in the Resources section to view and download Curriculum Maps for each Big Idea and grade.

How to read curriculum maps

The numbers in the top row of the curriculum map correspond to the months of the school year. For example, if your school year begins in September, then September would be month 1 on the map. If your school year begins in August, then August would be month one.

The shaded boxes marked with "X" represent the months in which a particular skill should be taught.

The map can be read using either a "horizontal trace" or a "vertical trace". To do a horizontal trace, you select a skill you are interested in, then trace across the row to find the months marked with an "X" for that skill. This will tell you which months a skill should be taught. To perform a vertical trace, select a particular month, then trace down the column to find the shaded boxes. The shaded boxes correspond to the skills that should be taught that month.

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University of Oregon Center on Teaching and Learning

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Instruction Phonemic awareness instruction typically spans two years, kindergarten and first grade. Oral activities in kindergarten focus on simple tasks such as rhyming, matching words with beginning sounds, and blending sounds into words.

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The Foundations of Literacy Learning

Click on either link to access the PDF handouts:

Electronic Handout

Print Handout

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Some suggestions for Literacy Centres that support Oral Language, Word Work, Reading and Writing development.

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Check out POPEY's collection of books to support students' awareness of words, syllables, rhymes, and phonemes.

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Use this website to generate your own Wordles for use with your students.

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Guess the hidden word in 6 tries. You can also share your own word!

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The Development of Phonological Skills - by Louisa Moats & Carol Tolman

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Basic listening skills and "word awareness" are critical precursors to phonological awareness. Learn the milestones for acquiring phonological skills.

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Phonological skill develops in a predictable progression. This concept is important, as it provides the basis for sequencing teaching tasks from easy to more difficult. Table 1 outlines the relative difficulty of phonological awareness tasks. Table 2 is a more specific synthesis of several research reviews and summaries (Adams et al., 1998; Gillon, 2004; Goswami, 2000; Paulson, 2004; Rath, 2001) that ties specific ages to the typical accomplishment of those phonological awareness tasks.

Prerequisite to phonological awareness is basic listening skill; the acquisition of a several-thousand word vocabulary; the ability to imitate and produce basic sentence structures; and the use of language to express needs, react to others, comment on experience, and understand what others intend.

Table 1. Phonological skills, from most basic to advanced

Word awareness

Tracking the words in sentences.

Note: This semantic language skill is much less directly predictive of reading than the skills that follow and less important to teach directly (Gillon, 2004). It is not so much a phonological skill as a semantic (meaning-based) language skill.

Responsiveness to rhyme and alliteration during word play

Enjoying and reciting learned rhyming words or alliterative phrases in familiar storybooks or nursery rhymes.

Syllable awareness

Counting, tapping, blending, or segmenting a word into syllables.

Onset and rime manipulation

The ability to produce a rhyming word depends on understanding that rhyming words have the same rime. Recognizing a rhyme is much easier than producing a rhyme.

Phoneme awareness

Identify and match the initial sounds in words, then the final and middle sounds (e.g., "Which picture begins with /m/?"; "Find another picture that ends in /r/").

Segment and produce the initial sound, then the final and middle sounds (e.g., "What sound does zoo start with?"; "Say the last sound in milk"; "Say the vowel sound in rope ").

Blend sounds into words (e.g., "Listen: /f/ /ē/ /t/. Say it fast").

Segment the phonemes in two- or three-sound words, moving to four- and five- sound words as the student becomes proficient (e.g., "The word is eyes. Stretch and say the sounds: /ī/ /z/").

Manipulate phonemes by removing, adding, or substituting sounds (e.g., "Say smoke without the /m/").

Table 2. Ages at which 80-90 percent of typical students have achieved a phonological skill

4

Rote imitation and enjoyment of rhyme and alliteration

pool, drool, tool
"Seven silly snakes sang songs seriously."

5

Rhyme recognition, odd word out

"Which two words rhyme:
stair, steel, chair?"

Recognition of phonemic changes in words

" Hickory Dickory Clock. That's not right!"

Clapping, counting syllables

5½

Distinguishing and remembering separate phonemes in a series

Show sequences of single phonemes with colored blocks: /s/ /s/ /f/; /z/ /sh/ /z/.

Producing a rhyme

"Tell me a word that rhymes with car." ( star)

Matching initial sounds; isolating an initial sound

"Say the first sound in ride (/r/); sock (/s/); love (/l/)."

6

Compound word deletion

"Say cowboy. Say it again, but don't say cow."

Syllable deletion

"Say parsnip. Say it again, but don't say par."

Phoneme segmentation of words that have simple syllables with two or three phonemes (no blends)

"Say the word as you move a chip for each sound."

6½

Phoneme segmentation of words that have up to three or four phonemes (include blends)

"Say the word slowly while you tap the sounds."

Phoneme substitution to build new words that have simple syllables (no blends)

"Change the /j/ in cage to /n/.
Change the /ā/ in cane to /ō/."

7

Sound deletion (initial and final positions)

"Say meat. Say it again, without the /m/."
"Say safe. Say it again, without the /f/."

8

Sound deletion (initial position, include blends)

"Say prank. Say it again, without the /p/."

9

Sound deletion (medial and final blend positions)

"Say snail. Say it again, without the /n/."
"Say fork. Say it again, without the /k/."

Paulson (2004) confirmed the hierarchy of phonological skill acquisition in 5-year-olds entering kindergarten. Only 7 percent of 5-year-olds who had not yet had kindergarten could segment phonemes in spoken words. The production of rhymes was more difficult for 5-year-olds than commonly assumed, as only 61 percent could give a rhyming word for a stimulus. Only 29 percent could blend single phonemes into whole words. Although some young students will pick up these skills with relative ease during the kindergarten year - especially if the curriculum includes explicit activities - other students must be taught these metalinguistic skills directly and systematically.

Moats, L, & Tolman, C (2009). Excerpted from Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS): The Speech Sounds of English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Phoneme Awareness (Module 2). Boston: Sopris West.

For more information on Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) visit Voyager Sopris .

For any reprint requests, please contact the author or publisher listed.

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Basic listening skills and "word awareness" are critical precursors to phonological awareness. Learn the milestones for acquiring phonological skills.

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Printable short and long vowel charts, vowel teams, blends and digraphs, and more...

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Many children have their first literacy experience by exploring their names: the letters and the sounds they make. Children need early exposure to begin to make letter-sound associations that then turn into early reading and writing experiences. As more skills are developed, children learn more tools to become active word solvers.

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Many children have their first literacy experience by exploring their names: the letters and the sounds they make. Children need early exposure to begin to make letter-sound associations that then turn into early reading and writing experiences. As more skills are developed, children learn more tools to become active word solvers.

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Segmenting CVC Words Using Toy Cars & Elkonin Boxes

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Segmenting CVC Words Using Toy Cars & Elkonin Boxes

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Watch as this student segments CVC words into phonemes, using toy cars and Elkonin boxes.

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Park Those Sounds!: Segmenting CVC Words into Phonemes in a Game

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POPEY's collection of Language Games to Support Phonological Awareness

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from the University of Florida Literacy Institute

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The Big Five: Phonics-Orthographic Mapping | Orton Gillingham Online Academy

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Orthographic mapping is now considered “the most current theory of how children form sight word representations” (Torgesen 2004b, p.36) From David Kilpatrick’s book, “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties.” In my previous blog, I described the importance of pho

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Word Wall I Spy: Developing Phonemic Awareness

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Word Wall I Spy: Developing Phonemic Awareness

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The Balanced Literacy Diet models how you can play Word Wall I Spy with your students

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Guess the Word: Developing Phonemic Awareness Using the Word Wall

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Free Download: Phonics Activities & Games Kit

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Free Download: Phonics Activities & Games Kit

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From Wiley Blevins & Sadlier School

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Support your students' early literacy development by building their phonics skills with engaging and fun activities that will:

Foster phonics skills in your classroom centers or at home

Develop students' self confidence with peer collaboration

Add an element of vocabulary to word building

Fill out the form to download the Phonics Activities & Games Kit now.

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Phonics Activities & Games Kit K-3 | Download | Sadlier School

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Support your students' early literacy development by building their phonics skills with engaging and fun activities that will: Foster phonics skills in your classroom centers or at home Develop students' self confidence with peer collaboration Add an element of vocabulary to word building Fill out the form to download the Phonics Activities & Games Kit now.

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POPEY's Word Ladders video

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Free Printable Resources: Phonological Awareness

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Free Printable Resources: Phonological Awareness

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The Florida Center for Reading Research has an extensive collection of free printable resources to support phonological awareness.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently. Students can complete the activities in small groups, pairs, or individually.

Accompanying these Student Center Activities is a Teacher Resource Guide that offers important insights on differentiated instruction and how to use the Student Center materials.

Component

Name of the reading component: Phonological Awareness (PA), Phonics (P), Fluency (F), Vocabulary (V), or Comprehension (C). Each component is color coded: PA is purple, P is orange, F is red, V is green, C is blue.

Subcomponent

Name of the reading subcomponent, which is a subskill of the component.

Activity Name

Activity Number

The letters correspond with the reading component (PA, P, F, V, or C). The numbers are listed in ascending order within each component. The activities are sequenced from simple to more complex within each component and subcomponent.

Student Icon

The suggested number of students for the activity. One student icon indicates that students may work independently or with a small group. Two student icons indicate that the activity requires students to work in pairs. Two student icons with a plus sign indicate that the activity requires two or more students.

Objective

States the goal of the activity, which is aligned with the subcomponent.

Materials

Materials are located on the pages that follow the Activity Plan. Most materials are non-consumable to be prepared and used repeatedly (e.g., word cards can be laminated). Some materials are consumable and will need to be duplicated for each student doing the activity. Other materials, such as counters, are commonly found in most classrooms.

Activity Statement

One sentence explanation of the purpose of the activity and what students do to complete the activity.

Activity Steps

The first step describes how to setup the center. The second step begins with: The student, Students, Working in pairs, or Taking turns depending on the number of students needed to complete the activity. The second step also starts the series of steps to complete the activity. The next steps explain what the student does to complete the activity. The last step lists one of three accountability methods: Self-check, Peer evaluation, or Teacher evaluation.

Example

A visual of the activity and key materials.

Extensions and Adaptations

Suggestions that extend or provide an adaptation for additional practice on the skill addressed in the activity. Materials for the extensions and adaptations are included after the pages that align to the Activity Plan.

Users may use the FCRR Student Center Activities resources as long as modifications are not made, the resources will only be used for non-profit educational purposes, and the copyright belong jointly to the Florida Department of Education and the Florida Center for Reading Research. These resources may not be used for any commercial purposes. These resources on our site may be linked to but not reposted, reproduced, modified, or copied to other sites. For questions about the use of these resources, please contact The Florida Center for Reading Research at fcrr@fcrr.org.

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From 2004 to 2010, a team of researchers and teachers at FCRR collected ideas and created Student Center Activities for use in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade classrooms. The activities are designed for students to practice, demonstrate, and extend their learning of what has already been taught, sometimes with teacher assistance and sometimes independently.

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Article: Nell Duke - What Wordle Reminds Us About Effective Phonics & Spelling Instruction

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Article: Nell Duke - What Wordle Reminds Us About Effective Phonics & Spelling Instruction

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It's hard to miss the meteoric rise of the craze. This game is not only a gift for lexophiles but also for educators. It reminds us that effective phonics and spelling instruction requires carefully designed, explicit teaching combined with volume reading, vocabulary building, and high levels of engagement.

The object of Wordle is to guess a five-letter word in six attempts. After each attempt, the game tells you which of the letters you guessed are in the word in the right place, which letters are in the word but in the wrong place, and which letters are not in the word at all. With 26 letters in the English alphabet, the game would be nearly impossible as a purely statistical exercise. But knowledge of English orthography (how words are spelled) puts the challenge within reach. Studying how to be successful with Wordle can be helpful to educators because it can remind us of some key points about effective phonics and spelling instruction. Here are the top five Wordle reminders that can boost literacy instruction.

1. Some letters are more common than others.

That some letters are more common than others is well known to players of Scrabble (think letter point values) or Wheel of Fortune (think of puzzle-starting r, s, t, l, n, e). Wordle players-I'll call them Wordlees-likely know this too. They're unlikely to play jazzy as their first word, whereas raise is a logical way to start.

2. The position of letters in a word matters.

Wordlees would consider placing ld at the end of a word (e.g., child), but would not consider placing it at the beginning of a word. The position of letters in a word matters. Although early on we teach children to associate the letter y with the /y/ sound, as in yo-yo, not long after in our scope and sequence, we need to teach children not to make that association at the end of words, lest they struggle to read words such as my and penny.

Wordlees were probably never explicitly taught that we don't begin words in English with ld. Rather, they learned this and many other things about English orthography from lots of exposure to a large body of words. Statistical learning from volume reading of texts in the language(s) one is learning to read, along with explicit instruction, is critical to word reading and spelling development.

3. Letters and sounds don't have a one-to-one match.

There are Wordle-eligible words in which there are five letters and five sounds, such as blast, but Wordlees will not be successful limiting themselves to those words. Rather, they must recognize that multiple letters can represent a single sound. For example, the word tough has five letters but only three sounds (/t/ /uh/ /f/), while the word thigh has five letters and two sounds (/th/ /ī/). One might think that the Wordle-eligible word queue is just one sound, as it is the letter name of the letter Q, but there are actually two sounds in the name of the letter Q (/k/ /ū/), as in most letter names in English (F = /eh/ /f/; G = /g/ /ē/), an important understanding for educators who teach reading .

Effective phonics and spelling instruction in English requires explicitly teaching the complex system of how letters and sounds relate . Letter-by-letter decoding is OK early on, but soon learners need to be looking at the letters around a letter-for example, s usually represents the /s/ sound, but if followed by h, we typically have the /sh/ sound. Some patterns require readers to look even further ahead-for example, to associate dge with /j/ and eigh with /ā/. Similarly, spelling development in English requires understanding that there are sometimes many different ways we can spell the same sound (e.g., eigh, a_e, ai, ay, ey. . .).

4. Vocabulary knowledge is important to word reading and spelling.

It doesn't take long playing Wordle to recognize that the larger your vocabulary, the better you are likely to do. You might easily think of words such as great and happy, but can you think of bezel or jugum?

We typically need to have a word in our vocabulary to even think to use it in our writing, and knowing the word's meaning can give us valuable hints about how to spell it-for example, spelling electrician rather than electrision. Explicit teaching of meaningful word parts (morphology) supports spelling development . Similarly, vocabulary knowledge helps us to read words-when we come across lemic, do we pronounce it with a short  e, like  lemon, or a long  e, like  lemur? Having the word lemic in our vocabulary would tell us. Of course, we need vocabulary knowledge not only to read and spell words, but to monitor and develop our comprehension and composition.

5. Phonics and spelling can be engaging.

Engaging with phonics and spelling can be highly engaging for children as well. One research-supported instructional technique for developing word reading and spelling called word building is not that different from Wordle. For example, young children might build sat, sap, tap, top, stop, and so on. Tim Rasinski, a professor of literacy education, incorporates meaning-based clues into word building . For example, from the word "dart," he asks students to "change one letter to make another word for soil or earth" (dirt).

Engagement deepens further as children actually deploy their developing phonics and spelling abilities to read and write texts to inform, persuade, entertain, and innovate.

Who knows-maybe one of your students will invent the hottest thing since, well, Wordle.

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What Wordle Reminds Us About Effective Phonics and Spelling Instruction

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It's hard to miss the meteoric rise of the craze. This game is not only a gift for lexophiles but also for educators. It reminds us that effective phonics and spelling instruction requires carefully designed, explicit teaching combined with volume reading, vocabulary building, and high levels of engagement.