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Segmenting Beginning Sounds Quiz | Game | Education.com

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Kids isolate and identify beginning sounds and strengthen early reading skills in this interactive phonics game.

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More worksheets can be created using this format.

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Phonemic awareness lessons are easy to add into your regular schedule of activities. Effective instruction takes just 15-20 minutes per day, and it doesn't all need to be in a classroom setting. For example, you can add phonemic awareness practice to other activities - picking out words that rhyme, counting syllables, and thinking of words that start with a particular sound can be done while running errands, at the playground, just about anywhere!

Just 15 minutes a day of Phonemic Awareness games can put your child on the road to reading.

We recommend this approach to planning a lesson:

Introduce a new activity or game

Practice the activity repeatedly

Extend the activity by making it more complex (if the child has grasped the basic concept)

Revisit the activity occasionally after you've moved on to more advanced activities

Again, keep your lessons short (15-20 minutes per day). You don't want to overwhelm your child, causing him/her to lose interest.
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Teachers generally start this curriculum with four-year-olds, but if your child is receptive, there's no reason you shouldn't introduce the first few modules ( A: Listening, B: Rhyming, and C: Sentences & Words) at age three.

Prepare yourself to teach phonemic awareness, especially in F: Word Familes and later modules, by learning how to pronounce the letter sounds correctly. Refer to our videos and chart so you can be sure to model the correct pronunciations for your child.

Phonemic awareness before reading is like training wheels before riding a bike. It makes learning easier, more enjoyable, and leaves the child with fewer bruises.

NOTE: Don't force the issue if your child is not interested, especially if he/she is at the young end of the age range. Children's brains develop at different rates, and "normal" covers a wide range. It's better to wait a few months than to unintentionally teach your child that learning is a punishment!

Our Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is specially designed and organized to lead your child from toddlerhood to full readiness for reading. Just go through the games and activities in order, making sure your child has a good handle on an activity before you move on to the next one.

Use our Pacing & Assessment page to get an idea of where to focus your lessons for kids at different age levels.
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Every child is unique and will progress through our Curriculum at a different speed. Some kids find the Rhyming games super-easy but get hung up on Syllables. Others may struggle with Words & Sentences but breeze through the Compound Words activities games. A teacher may have all these children in the same classroom.

Many of our activity pages feature recommendations for adjusting the activity to the needs of your particular child or classroom:

Confidence Builders suggest ways to simplify an activity for a struggling student.

Extensions offer tips for challenging the advanced students who are a little ahead of their classmates.

Variations suggest ways to change up the game a little, by tailoring it to a child's special interests or making it "portable."

Small Group Adaptations offer ideas for scaling up from an individual child to a small group (2-5 children), ensuring that every child is engaged and learning.

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We recommend that preschool teachers work primarily with small groups (2-5 children) to teach Phonemic Awareness. To aid teachers, every activity in our Phonemic Awareness curriculum has a Small Group Adaptation with tips for adapting the game from an individual child to a group.

Small group instruction of 2-5 children has proven to be the most effective size for an adult to be able to monitor the understanding and correct the responses of group members.

Teachers should form their small groups based on individual assessments of their students. You can find several assessments on the Pacing, Assessment, & Fast Track page. Place children with similar levels of skill in your small groups. Some children with very limited skill in an area may need to be in groups of 2 or 3. Other children may not need any instruction in a specific skill.

Change the size and composition of your small groups periodically as you teach different modules of the curriculum. Individual assessment results and observing children's performance are the tools you need to help you arrange and rearrange your small groups as you teach the curriculum lessons.

A collection of Turn-Taking Strategies is designed to give teachers options for calling on children during small group lessons. These techniques help teachers to call on children in random order, so every child gets to participate equally in the activity and to learn the concept being taught.

Even in small groups, teachers simply cannot provide the same amount of one-on-one attention as a parent can. We strongly recommend that teachers involve parents, guardians, and caregivers in the process of teaching their children Phonemic Awareness. For each of our twelve modules, we have created a Reinforcement At Home form. Teachers should send this form home with all students with a check mark for the activities they have been working on in the classroom. The form should be accompanied by strong encouragement that parents play the same games at home, in order to reinforce the child's education and to notice (and inform the teacher) if there are concepts the child is struggling with. Teachers should also make a special note on this form of any activities that a particular child needs extra practice on.
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Q: My child has already started learning Phonics at school. Should I still try to teach him Phonemic Awareness?
A: Yes! If your child is old enough to be learning phonics at school, he may already have pretty good phonemic awareness. But phonemic awareness is vitally important as the foundation on which to build his reading skills, so you can still go through our curriculum with him, if only to confirm that he has already developed these skills. Start with some Syllables games, and if he does them easily, just move on to the next module. You may discover some sections where he struggles - be sure to help him master those skills before he gets too much further with phonics. To sum up, it can't hurt, and it might help a lot!

Q: I'm a teacher. How long will it take to get my students back up to speed after summer vacation?
A: Encourage the students' parents to go to our website and play phonemic awareness games with the kids over vacation. But of course, some will and some won't. Plan to spend up to one month at the beginning of the school year reviewing material from the spring. Remember, we are building a foundation, and we want to be sure that foundation is solid. Once you're sure the kids have retained (or re-learned!) last year's material, start introducing brand new activities.
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Phonemic awareness lessons are easy to add into your regular schedule of activities. Effective instruction takes just 15-20 minutes per day, and it doesn't all need to be in a classroom setting.

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More worksheets can be created using this format.

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A guide to Assess and pace phonemic awareness 

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A guide to Assess and pace phonemic awareness 

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Teachers generally start this curriculum with four-year-olds, but if your child is interested, there's no reason not to introduce some of these concepts at home as early as age three.

If your child is younger, be prepared to spend a lot of time on the first two or three modules: Listening, Rhyming, and Sentences & Words. Your child is still learning the basics of how to sit still and pay attention; there's no need to move on to more advanced topics until he has gotten the hang of the basics.

NOTE: Don't force the issue if your child is not interested, especially if he is at the young end of the age range. Children's brains develop at different rates, and "normal" covers a wide range. It is much better to wait a few months than to unintentionally teach your child that education is a punishment to be suffered through.
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Our Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is specially designed and organized to lead your child from toddlerhood to full readiness for reading. Just go through the games and activities in order, making sure your child has a good handle on an activity before you move on to the next one.

Print out this Phonemic Awareness Pacing Guide for suggestions on where to focus your lessons for kids at different age levels.

Use our Pacing Guide as a reference.

We start with Listening games to teach children to pay attention to the sounds around them. Rhyming games introduce the idea that many words have similar sounds even when they mean different things. Activities on Sentences & Words, Compound Words, and Syllables gradually teach children about the structure of language and how it can be broken down into individual words and word parts. In later sections children will play games to learn how to hear and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) within words. By the end of the Beginning Reading module, your child will know all the letter sounds and will be well on his way to learning to read!

Phonological Awareness: Sounds in Language

Phonemic Awareness: Sounds in Words

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Assessment is an important part of teaching - you need to know if the children are actually learning what you are teaching them! We recommend doing three quick assessments, at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year.

Do an initial assessment at the beginning of the year to see where the children are starting out. This will give you an idea of what they already know and what they have yet to learn.

Do a second assessment in the middle of the school year. If a child is struggling with or not retaining the Phonemic Awareness lessons, you need to know about it while there's still time in the year to address and fix the problem. This mid-year assessment will let you know if you need to adjust your pacing or if certain children need extra one-on-one instruction time.

Do a final assessment at the end of the year to see what the children have achieved with a full year of Phonemic Awareness instruction. This also gives you a great document to hand off to whoever will teach these children next year!

Below are some high-quality, free assessment materials we have discovered:

Get Ready to Read is highly respected in the early reading professional world. This screening tool has just twenty questions and is normed to four-year-olds. it also has activities for parents to use to strengthen weak areas.

Hello Two Peas in a Pod Phonological Awareness Assessment: This free download includes clear instructions on how to conduct a quick, informal assessment of your children. The form is already formatted for our recommended beginning/middle/end-of-year assessment sessions.

Phonological Awareness Skills Assessment: This is another informal screening tool designed for for Kindergarten students.

University of Oregon Center on Teaching and Learning: DIBELS stands for Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. This assessment is more difficult to administer (it requires a stopwatch), but it is designed for use with Kindergarten and First Grade students.

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Because children have different levels of mastery of the skills of this curriculum, use our Fast Track page to decide if/when they can move through the lessons at a faster pace. The Fast Track provides you a guide to determine which lessons may be okay for a child to skip or leave for a later time in teaching the curriculum.

Some parents or preschool teachers who have just discovered the importance of Phonemic Awareness may need a speedier way to get their children ready for the beginning of Kindergarten and phonics instruction. Or they may need to determine which topics a child already understands and doesn't need to spend time on.
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Q: It's mid-November of my child's Pre-K year at school. What activity should she be playing right now?
A: There are several factors that go into answering this question. Has she received any prior instruction in Phonemic Awareness, either at home or at school? Is she currently getting any Phonemic Awareness instruction at school? Is she able to sit still and pay attention during short lessons and games? If you don't know where your child's skill level is, it's best to start at the beginning of our curriculum. Your child may move very quickly through a few modules with concepts she already understands. But it is better to go slowly and reinforce those basic concepts than to assume she is more advanced than she actually is and lead her to get frustrated and discouraged.

Q: I am a Kindergarten teacher. Most of my students are five years old but have never been taught Phonemic Awareness. Where should I begin?
A: If your students have had no Phonemic Awareness training, then it is vitally important that you give them this crucial foundation for their education! This will mean spending lots of time on activities that our Pacing Guide says are normally appropriate for younger students. Skim through Rhyming (hopefully they at least got a lot of rhyming activities last year), then dive into Sentences & Words and the subsequent modules. Do not skip ahead to the later modules. A child who can't divide words into syllables will find it nearly impossible to divide words into individual sounds.
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Teachers generally start this curriculum with four-year-olds, but if your child is interested, there's no reason not to introduce some of these concepts at home as early as age three. If your child is younger, be prepared to spend a lot of time on the first two or three modules: Listening, Rhyming, and Sentences & Words.

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Learn Sound Pronunciation Before Teaching 

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Learn Sound Pronunciation Before Teaching 

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When a child knows the proper sounds of the alphabet letters, he or she can use those sounds to sound out or decode a word. This skill is essential for successful phonics instruction later on. The more accurately the sounds are taught to children, the easier it will be for them to learn to read and spell.

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I had high hopes for this app but found some issues that need to be addressed before I can give it a higher rating. As a Reading Specialist I will not continue to use it until those are made, for instance when segmenting sounds beginning blends should not go together in one sound box, they are 2 separate sounds and each need their own box. Also, the sound for /b/ sounds like /p/ and should be adjusted. I hope you make these changes.

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‎Phonics Awareness is a comprehensive, low cost educational app based on the pre-reading skills 1st graders must have as they move from hearing sounds, into seeing the letter as a representation for the sound. This is the beginning of true phonics learning. Teachers can easily integrate these lessons...

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-Online game website

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ABCya! * First Grade Learning Games, Ages 6 - 7

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Kids LOVE our free online games! Fly dragons, build dream houses, and explore while practicing addition, reading, and more 1st grade skills. Play now!

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Children will learn the alphabet along with the sound of each letter.