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This website is beneficial for students in Kindergarten until students in Ninth Grade. There is a lot of options for students to learn from this website through puzzles and board games. If a student answers one of the questions wrong on this website, they explain what the right answer is and why in a amusing way. I tried these different activities and thought they were fun and beneficial.

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Our phonemic awareness games are simple to use and fun to play.
Just read the rules below, and click on the printable link to get started on one of our fun, easy-to-use games.

Letter Lane Free Phonics Game

Skills: Beginning consonant sounds: b, d, f, m
Grade level: preK-1
Players: 2-3
Objective: Be the first player to reach END
Supplies: Printable game board, answer key, and cards; one marker for each player

Preparation: Print the board, key and cards. Laminate and cut apart. Shuffle the cards and place them face down on the table. Review the name for each with the players.
Printable Rules
To play:

1. Players put their markers on START.

2. The first player draws the top card. He moves his marker to the first picture with the same beginning sound. For example, if he draws M, he moves to the mushroom. He puts his card face down in a discard pile. The other players continue in the same manner.

3. When a player draws the duck or the fish (the cards with no letters), he moves his marker to that space, even if he must move backwards.

4. If no one has reached END when the game cards run out, shuffle, restack, and reuse them.

5. To move into the END space a player must draw D or F.

6. The first player to END is the winner of the round.

More Phonemic Awareness Games

We know that the best spellers are usually kids who start early to develop good phonics skills. We have several games on our site to help you help your child develop these skills, including the one on this page. There's no reading required.

Picture This - short vowel sounds

Picture Perfec t - long vowel sounds

More Early Learning Resources

If you enjoyed our phonemic awareness games, we think you'll also like some of these:

ABC Phonics Poem - A fun and funny way to learn about initial sounds!

Alphabet Phonics Booklet - Students customize their own pages in this A to Z phonics activity.

Phonics Printables - 2 super-simple worksheets for beginners, featuring the letters b, c, d, f, g, and h as initial consonants

Phonics Worksheet - Here's more practice with initial consonants. This page features j, k and l.

Rhyme Time Two cute printables to give early learners practice in identifying rhyming words with short and long vowel sounds.

Lots of Leaves! - Students will discern long and short vowel phonics sounds as they complete this appealing page.

Short vowel Worksheets - 5 easy worksheets to practice the short vowel sounds for a, e, i, o and u.

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Fun Phonemic Awareness Games Help to Teach Basic Phonics

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Our phonemic awareness games are simple to use and fun to play. Just read the rules below, and click on the printable link to get started on one of our fun, easy-to-use games.

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These are 10 great fun activities to help students learn this skill. These can be done in the classroom or at home. Age range is from Pre-K to Thirds Grade.

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Hearing and identifying similar word patterns (sound matching) and listening for and detecting spoken syllables (syllable counting)

Ask your child what it means when words rhyme.

Ask your child to give you an example.

Share some rhyming words with your child by saying three words, two of which rhyme, and have children identify the rhyming pair.

Tell children the number of rhyming pairs in a nursery rhyme (e.g., Jill, hill) and challenge them to listen for and find them as you read aloud.

(optional) Give your child a noisemaker or musical instrument (triangle, bell, etc.).

Read the nursery rhyme again, and invite your child to use their noisemaker each time they hear the second half of a rhyming pair.

Sound Favorites

Have your child practice phoneme matching by asking them to name his or her favorite hobby or treat. Explain that "favorites" must begin with the same sound as the child's name. (e.g., Patty and peanut butter)

Invite children to "introduce" people they know by telling what he or she likes. For example, Grace likes grapes and granola. Samantha likes swimming.

Hink Pink

Explain to children the definition of hink pink - a pair of rhyming words that answers a riddle.

Read aloud the following riddles, and invite children to guess the hink-pink answer:

What do you call a chubby kitty? (fat cat)

What do you call a crying father? (sad dad)

What do you call a rabbit who tells jokes? (funny bunny)

Invite your child to think of other rhyming pairs.

See if you can use these words to make clues for new hink pinks.

Parts of a Word

Identifying onsets and rimes (syllable splitting) and blending individual sounds to form a word (phoneme blending)

An onset is all of the sounds in a word that come before the first vowel. A rime is the first vowel in a word and all the sounds that follow. For example, in the word flight , the onset is fl- and the rime is -ight.

Who Did You Catch?

Practice blending onsets and rimes (e.g., r-at, bl-ock)

Then, teach your child how to sing the following verse to the tune of "A-Hunting We Will Go"

A-searching we will go, a-searching we will go, We'll find a /c/ and add a /ow/, and now we have a cow!

Repeat the verse using other onsets and rimes.

To begin, use animal names (as these are typically more familiar for children), then switch to word families such as -at (bat, hat, sat) and -og (frog, bog, log). For more advanced learning, segment the word into individual phonemes or switch the sounds around. For example, We'll catch an /at/ and add a /c/, and now we have a cat!

Tell your child you are going to say words in a "secret code," and the key to "unlocking" the code is to extend and blend the sounds together. Give an example: If I say /h/ /a/ /m/, you say ham.

Provide additional words and see if your child can solve the mystery code.

Bubble Gum Words

This helps children slow down as they pronouce words. By slowing down they are better able to hear sounds that make up words.

Say a word. (This could be a familiar word from their reading or thier environment.)

Have children repeat each word slowly, putting their hands to their mouths and pretending to s-t-r-e-t-c-h bubble gum out in front of them.

Repeat with other words.

Identifying where a given sound is heard in a word (approximation) and identifying beginning, middle, and ending sounds in a word (phoneme isolation)

Mystery Trip

Choose a specific sound pattern such as the beginning sound /b/. Explain that you are packing a suitcase for a special trip, and only the items that have the "secret sound" in their names will fit in the suitcase.

Reveal objects and place them in the suitcase (all of which fit the secret sound pattern, such as bunny and ball). Invite your child to "pack" an object, when they think they know the sound. Make sure to have them say the name aloud. Tell your child whether or not their object fits (contains the secret sound).

Ask your child to name the secret sound.

Ask your child if they can think of any other objects that would "fit" in the suitcase.

Play again using other secret sounds.

Click here to check out the video of us packing for a "trip."

Counting the number of phonemes in a word (phoneme counting) and identifying individual sounds within a word (phoneme segmentation).

I Spy - helps children with phoneme counting and phoneme isolation

Have children identify "spied" objects by listening to your phoneme clues. Invite them to guess after each clue is give. For example,

I spy an object with three sounds in its name.

I spy an object with three sounds in its name and the first one is /b/.

I spy an object with three sounds in its name and the first one is /b/ and the last is /k/.

I spy an object with three sounds in its name and the first one is /b/, and the last is /k/, and it rhymes with look.

Repeat with different objects.

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10 Super Fun Phonemic Awareness Activities - Welcome to LiteracyDoc!

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Hearing and identifying similar word patterns (sound matching) and listening for and detecting spoken syllables (syllable counting) Ask your child what it means when words rhyme. Ask your child to give you an example. Share some rhyming words with your child by saying three words, two of which rhyme, and have children identify the rhyming pair.

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This resource is provided for students who are looking for a free app, rather than one with a cost.

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Last Updated on September 10, 2020 by Editorial Team

Phonemic awareness is the ability to establish sequence of speech sounds that form a part of any spoken word or syllable. Any word is made of phenome, which is the smallest mental unit of sound that any alphabet or its group carries. Phonemic awareness allows the learners to have the ability to distinguish these phenomes and eventually learn pronunciation and spelling of the words.

This awareness is conspicuously weak in the children having condition of dyslexia. Due to this condition, the children are not able to associate sound of the letter with its physical form, making it difficult for them to read and write.

Thus, phonemic awareness building is an important teaching activity designed for building word building intelligence in dyslexic children.
Importance of phonemic awareness in early learners
Phonemic awareness is useful for building word skills like reading, speaking (pronunciation) and writing in early learners. Some of the ways it helps the beginners at word building are:

1. It acts as a primer for building reading skills as children easily differentiate between the sounds of alphabetical sequence and read the words correctly

2. It is also important for building spelling skills

3. It helps understand the alphabetic principle that outlines how the letters are represented by sequence of sounds

4. Phonemic awareness is pure auditory and is related to building the capacity of recognizing words by the sequence of sounds and vice versa, means it helps the students to break the words or syllables into underlying sounds or phenomes.

Role of apps in improving their phonemic awareness
Apps offer a playful way of inculcating speaking and reading skills in a child in the early learning stage. They offer an interesting way of developing pre-reading skills which comprise largely matching of word or syllables with the sound. The apps may comprise of teaching guides and tips, or these can be in games form that help steer away the fear of reading from the child's mind. With the help of apps, the children can not only learn but also internalize the alphabetical principles by the way of activities, practice sets and gamification.

So, listed below are the 10 best apps for phonemic awareness building that are available at Google Play Store and Apple Apps store; and they are absolutely free!

1. Sounds Beginnings

This app features 12 learning games that provide practice of reading and phonics. It is providing good help for learning the beginning, middle and end sound of the word. There are matching sets provided in the game. Whenever child touches any letter, its corresponding sound comes out aloud and the picture of an object that starts with that letter is presented too. Simple UI, quick to understand, easy to use, this app teaches words sounds through gamification.

App Link : Appstore

2. Phonemic Chart

It is a free android app that helps you hear and discern the sounds of vowels and consonants and the words on the whole. The user needs to click on the IPA symbol provided in the chart that appears in the interface of this app. The app is divided into three sections - vowels, diphthongs and consonants. Very intelligently designed app, it features the words written in black or red to enable easy reading. Diphthongs are also arranged according to their second sound, while pure vowels are arranged according to mouth shape. It offers quite a practical way of enhancing phonemic awareness.

App Link : Appstore | Playstore

3. What's changed

What's Changed is a word speaking and reading abilities builder app. With an aim to enhance phonemic awareness among children, the app helps build the ability to discern sound of the word and the sequence of the sounds appearing in a word. The app uses segmentation and blending techniques to teach the child about different sounds that emerge due to replacing of letters in the word. It offers a promising way of improving the reading abilities in the child. The app also offers the facility to assess the progress of the child through a scoring system.

App Link : Appstore

4. Phonemes - IPA Chart, transcription and pronunciation

This app is useful in converting text to phonetic presentations. It is very nicely-built, elaborate app that offers a look at the mouth movements too while uttering any sound through a comprehensive visual. It provides look up chart for vowels, non-pulmonic and pulmonic consonants. The app is also useful for transcription purposes as one can learn about accents, too, with its help. It is a features-enriched app that serves as starting guide for the phonemic awareness building.

With the help of charts, visual support and word-phenome sound match tool, this app covers all aspects of phonemic learning, and thus, is of great help for the kids.

App Link : Playstore

5. Phoneme Farm: Phonemic Awareness App for Kids

Phoneme farm is an app that helps build phonemic awareness in early learners using an engaging farm background. This app makes use of songs, games and characters to make the phonemic learning or word skills learning super fun for kids. There are about 49 hand-on lessons provided and kids are encouraged time to time for their efforts. Dashboard adds to the usability factor as it allows parents to adjust it according to their child's needs. Parents can do an activity together with their kids to help them use this app. The kids can use this app on their own too.

App Link : Appstore | Playstore

6. Jolly Phonics Lessons

Jolly Phonics is an awesome teaching support that comes with lots of resources and features to help teachers create phonemic awareness in young children. The app is using synthetic phonics approach to equip children with five basic skills they need to have for reading and writing. Main features of this app are:

Jolly songs for each letter sound

Animated letter formation

Action image and related instructions

Letter sounds audio for all types of sounds to develop phonemic awareness through auditory means

Rich repertoire of word and flash cards

This phonemic awareness app is very simple in design and thus, quick to understand.

App Link : Appstore | Playstore

7. Phonogram Sounds

It is an app from the All About Reading program, an initiative designed to offer mastery in developing phonemic awareness in children. It helps develop essential pre-reading skills in children which they can use further for learning all five components of reading.

The way of teaching child the word's sound is very easy. The child just taps the letter and its corresponding sound emanates from the interface. The user can also swipe to see different views. This mastery-based phonemic awareness building app offers ease of learning spelling rules. The app contains all 72 basic phonograms useful for building spelling and pronunciation skills.

App Link : Appstore | Playstore

8. Phonemic Awareness Bubbles

This app helps prepare child to develop phonemic awareness which can further be used to strengthen and enhance reading skills. Children can learn primary sounds of the letters. They internalize alphabetic principles and develop spelling skills. The ability to break the words into phonemes or phonemic awareness becomes easy to develop with this app. Apart from the sounds, it is useful for teaching the functions of the letters too. The beginning sound of the letter becomes easier to discern for the children by using this app on a regular basis.

App Link : Appstore

9. Basic phonics 1 Lite

It is a feature-rich app useful for teaching the beginners of reading. Reading sounds like s (/s/), a /æ/, t (/t/) and p (/p/) become easier with the guidance provided with this app. The app utilizes mnemonic technique to teach reading and writing of letters Aa to Zz. Visual tools enable easier picture word association by building memory bridge helpful for child in retaining spelling and sound of letter principles in mind. Apart from building phonemic awareness, this app also offers support for blending, segmenting, and letter-sound associations.

App Link : Playstore

10. toPhonetics

This app uses International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) system to help turn the alphabets into their respective phonetic transcriptions. It can help learning British and American ways of sounding out the letters. The app is offering reading support by providing text comprising of sentences whose structure is preserved to match the phonetic transcription for easier word-transcript match. The app includes valued added features like name of countries, popular names, capitals, US states, UK countries and so on.

App Link : Appstore | Playstore

So, install these apps to get a rich teaching support for homeschooling dyslexic kids or to make reading hour more engaging for the kids at school by building their pre-reading skills.
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Top 10 must-have free apps for phonemic awareness - Number Dyslexia

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Last Updated on September 10, 2020 by Editorial Team Phonemic awareness is the ability to establish sequence of speech sounds that form a part of any spoken word or syllable. Any word is made of phenome, which is the smallest mental unit of sound that any alphabet or its group carries.

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The cost of these games range from free to $4.99. They can be used during school or after school for additional help for all ages.

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iLive Grammar

Simply practice, but effective.

Grammar Contactions

iPod app, but works on iPad. Oldie but goodie

Custom spelling practice.

This is a free partner app to the popular Spelling City website. There are free options also but limited. Great for those teachers already using Spelling City.

Writing

Story Creation- Both of these apps allow you to create actual iBooks!

Book Creator for iPad

Stuck on your story? This apps gives storyline suggestions

This is a favorite. Meant for K-2. Also can make your own sentence building activities.

The best rhyming word processor out there!

Inspiration Maps is a App based on the great mind mapping computer software Inspiration. Worth the cost, especially under volume purchase.

Over 25 graphic organizers ready to use. Can then be emailed to teacher.

Kids Book Report

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iLive Grammar Simply practice, but effective. Grammar Contactions iPod app, but works on iPad. Oldie but goodie Custom spelling practice. This is a free partner app to the popular Spelling City website. There are free options also but limited. Great for those teachers already using Spelling City.

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First Grade Phonemic Awareness Assessment Ideas

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First Grade Phonemic Awareness Assessment Ideas

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In this document, it gives me examples on words to use to assess my students. I would not use this document since I am unaware how viable it is, but it is a good starting point to help guide me assess my students.

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If students in a First Grade classroom are having trouble grasping the concept, these are fun ways to practice.

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When talking about letter sounds, show your child what your mouth does to create the sound. Describe where your tongue is and how you're breathing.
"When I make the m sound, I press my lips together and make my voice hum like this "mmmmm". My tongue is relaxed." Choose a letter sound, then have your child find things around your house that start with the same sound. This is great activity to do in the kitchen while making dinner. "Can you find something in our house that starts with the letter "s" ssssss sound? Stairs, sofa, sandwich."
Sound Hunters
Have your child give a rhyme for a word you tell them. It can be a made up word. "What rhymes with "bindergarten"?
Ridiculous Rhymes

Be Silly!

Make up your own rhymes, songs, or silly stories to focus on a particular sound. Big Billy blows beautiful bubbles!

What's the Sound?

When you're reading together with your child, pick a word from the book and put emphasis on the first sound. Pick another word and compare them. "Aaaaaaalligator and eeeeeeeelephant. Can you hear what letter aaaaaligator starts with? Is it the same as eeeeelephant? What letter does elephant start with?"
Before kids are ready to read words, they need to be able to separate the sounds they hear in words. Tell them a whole word, like "cat" and have them separate the sounds as they touch their head /c/, then shoulders /a/, then knees /t/ (and toes for four sounds if they can handle it!). At the end, have them say the whole word, "cat", as they stand back up. If it's too hard for them, slow down saying the word and stretch out each sound so they can better hear the individual sounds.
Head Shoulder Knees and Toes

Fingers Up

Take turns saying a word while the other person puts up their fingers to match the number of sounds. For "cat," they'd hold up their pointer finger for "c", middle finger for "a" and ring finger for "t".

Show Me

Using Cheerios, rocks or beads, say a word and have your child show you how many sounds the word makes. For example, "cap" = c+a+p = three sounds, so they'd place three objects in a row. Then have them tap each object as they say the sound. Remember, your child is just showing you the sounds they hear. So the word "take" would be = t-a-k (silent e) = only three sounds.

Tell Me the Members of the Word Family

Word families are words that rhyme. Tell your child the "mom's" name is "bat" and they have to tell you all the "kids'" names, such as cat, fat, sat, rat, pat, mat, at, and hat. This will help children hear patterns in words.

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First Grade Phonemic Awareness | Knowing Sounds in 1st Grade

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Learn more about first grade phonemic awareness, as well as find free 1st grade goals & activities around knowing sounds.

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Difference Between Phonics and Phonemic Awareness 

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Difference Between Phonics and Phonemic Awareness 

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I have noticed that students misunderstand the difference between Phonics and Phonemic Awareness. Not only does this source differentiate the two, but goes into detail on why the are both important.

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In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified 5 components of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition to naming these five components, the NRP also concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needed to be increased in primary grades. While both phonemic awareness and phonics were named separately, these two terms are often confused or used interchangeably. Both components are absolutely essential for reading, but it is important to understand that they are not the same thing.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic Awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, called phonemes. Phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, and the focus is on the sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is often confused with phonics, however, unlike phonics, phonemic awareness does not involve print or letter names. It is critical to understand the difference between the two, as reading is phonologically based, not visual as we often think it is.

Phonemic awareness instruction provides children with the understanding that the words they hear in oral language are not whole units but are co-articulated sounds that make up a word. Once children have this understanding, we can have them isolate, blend, segment and manipulate those sounds. These phonemic awareness skills are necessary to becoming a proficient, fluent reader.

The basic phonemic awareness skill of blending directly correlates to phonic decoding or sounding out a word. When we blend, we take the parts (sounds) and blend them together to make a whole word. For example, the sounds /s/ /u/ /n/ blended together make the word sun.

Segmenting is also a basic phonemic awareness skill. Segmenting mirrors blending and directly correlates to encoding or spelling. When we segment, we take the whole word and break it into parts. If I segment the word plan into all of the phonemes I hear, /p/ /l/ /a/ /n/, I will be able to spell that word once I have letter-sound knowledge (phonics).

Why is Phonemic Awareness Important?

In the past, many parents and educators have thought that teaching blending and segmenting was adequate phonemic awareness instruction. However, research shows that instruction in phoneme manipulation plays a critical role in creating proficient and fluent readers. As Louisa Moats states in her podcast Of Hard Words and Straw Men, "Perhaps the most critical and least-practiced component of effective early instruction is phoneme awareness. Awareness of the sounds that make up spoken words, facility at manipulating those sounds, and the links between speech and print must be mastered for students to be fluent readers and accurate spellers of an alphabetic writing system like ours."

Phoneme manipulation includes adding, deleting and substituting sounds in words. When engaging in these phonemic awareness activities, students learn they can make more words by manipulating individual sounds. For example, I can add /m/ at the beginning of at to make the word mat. I can also delete phonemes to make new words - the word play without /l/ is pay. I could also substitute a sound to make a new word. In the same word play I can change the /l/ to a /r/ and the new word is pray/prey. If students are able to manipulate phonemes orally, they will be able to transfer these skills to reading and writing during phonics instruction.

Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling. Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes (e.g. may, day, say, pay, lay) to read the words.

When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds - they might spell the word cat as ct. Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in.

While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it. Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. I can ask students to tell me the first sound they hear in the word man /m/, even if they do not yet know that M is the letter that makes the sound /m/.

The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Spelling

Once students are engaged in phonics instruction, we can see the evidence of phonemic awareness skills in their reading and spelling. Educators and parents can observe students blending sounds together to read words or turning unknown words into automatic sight words by quickly manipulating phonemes (e.g. may, day, say, pay, lay) to read the words.

When students write, we can look at their spelling and see the sounds they are hearing in words. Oftentimes, our younger readers and writers hear the first and last sounds in words before the medial sounds - they might spell the word cat as ct. Analyzing writing and spelling helps us guide our instruction on which phonemic awareness skills students still need instruction in.

While phonemic awareness instruction transfers to reading and writing, we do not need to wait to teach it. Students can engage in phonemic awareness lessons before they know their letters and sounds. I can ask students to tell me the first sound they hear in the word man /m/, even if they do not yet know that M is the letter that makes the sound /m/.

What is Phonics?

While phonemic awareness is oral and auditory, phonics instruction is both visual and auditory. The focus of phonics instruction is letter-sound relationships. During explicit phonics instruction students are taught the letter or letter combinations that represent the 44 sounds or phonemes in the English language.

As students match letters or letter combinations to the sounds they hear in words, they apply the phonemic awareness skills of blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes with the print that represents each sound. In this way, phonemic awareness is connected to phonics. When students know the sounds the letters they see in print make, they are able to blend or manipulate those sounds to read words. When spelling, students hear the whole word, segment the word into sounds and match the letter or letter combinations to the sound it makes.

Critics of explicit phonics instruction believe that the English language is too unpredictable, and students should learn to use context or visual cues to "read" words rather than sounding them out. While it is true that English is not always predictable, it is still an alphabetic language with many consistencies. In fact, 84% of English words are phonetically regular. Additionally, many of the irregular words are only often irregular by one phoneme only.

For example, in the word the, the initial sound /th/ is phonetically correct, and the letter e saying /u/ is not. Compare this to using context clues, in which only 25% of words can be predicted through context (Gough, Alford, & Holley-Wilcox). Many of those words are function words like the and an. As readers move on to more content-focused texts, only 10% of words can be predicted by context (Gough, et al., 1983).

Why Should We Teach Both?

To understand the importance of phonemic awareness and phonics, we must first understand that reading is not natural. We do not learn to read the same way we learn to speak. In fact, reading is relatively new when we compare the amount of time humans have been communicating orally to when reading first came on the scene. As Barbara Foorman so clearly states, "Humans are biologically specialized to produce language and have done so for nearly 1 million years. Such is not the case with reading and writing. If it were, there would not be illiterate children in the world."

It is essential to explicitly teach students how sounds in words work (phonemic awareness) and how those sounds connect to the letters they see in print (phonics). Phonemic Awareness instruction does not replace phonics instruction, but rather, both skills are necessary when teaching students to decode words accurately and automatically. As Wiley Blevins explains, "Phonemic awareness training provides the foundation on which phonics instruction is built. Thus, children need solid phonemic awareness training for phonics instruction to be effective."

According to the research brief completed by the EAB, reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade should have a greater focus on word decoding until students become fluent readers. Much work has been done around Linnea Ehri's phases of word reading to help us understand how phonemic awareness progresses into phonics, phonic decoding and eventually fluent and automatic reading.

In the partial alphabetic phase of reading, children begin to understand that words are made up of individual sounds and learn the letters that represent those sounds. As they move beyond the partial alphabetic stage, and into the full alphabetic stage children begin using the skills of blending and segmenting to decode and encode words.

The Literacy Gap

It has often been thought that if children could blend and segment they would be proficient readers. However, blending and segmenting are only enough to get children to the full and consolidated alphabetic phases, not the automatic phase of reading. This is the cause of the lack of proficient readers our nation produces. In 2019, NAEP scores revealed that only 35% of 4th graders and 34% of 8th were considered to be proficient readers. Many of our students are left at the basic or below basic level of reading. There are two main contributors to the struggle to create proficient readers:

1. Students are not explicitly taught phonemic awareness and phonics. Instead, they think of words as visual and memorize them as whole units. They tend to guess at words using picture clues or the beginning sounds in a word. As we shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" in 3rd grade and beyond, these students do not have any strategies to read unknown words.

2. Students may have received explicit phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, but only to the basic levels of blending and segmenting. This allows students to sound out words, but does not give them the skills necessary to turn unknown words into automatic sight words. Sounding out words, or phonic decoding, does not allow students to focus on the content and comprehend what they are reading. Instead, they are laboring over the words they are reading and focusing on decoding.

All of Ehri's phases of reading are important to the development of a reader. However, we don't want students to get stuck in the full and consolidated alphabetic phases. We need to move beyond those stages and provide advanced phonemic awareness instruction with phoneme manipulation to allow students to reach the automatic phase. We can show students how the work we do through the air can transfer to print, allowing them to read and spell more words.

Bringing Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction Together

While phonemic awareness and phonics are not the same thing, they do enjoy a reciprocal relationship. We do not need to wait for phonemic awareness to be fully developed before beginning phonics instruction. Instead, educators should help students understand the connection between phonemic awareness and phonics. When planning reading instruction, phonemic awareness only needs to be about 10-12 minutes of the literacy block for the primary grades. This instruction should include early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills.

Within the same literacy block, instruction should teach students how to apply the phonemic awareness skills to print, focusing on grapheme-phoneme correspondences. We can explicitly show students how blending sounds through the air connects to reading words as we blend the sounds the letters represent to read a word. We can model spelling words by segmenting whole words into individual sounds. Once we hear the sounds in words, we use our phonics knowledge to use the appropriate grapheme(s) to represent the sounds we hear.

For older students, phonemic awareness and phonics instruction can happen in tandem. We show students how we can manipulate phonemes in words by changing phonemes within print. Repeated practice allows students "to bond the spellings, pronunciations, and meanings of specific words in memory" (Ehri, 2014). These repeated exposures to grapheme-phoneme correspondences is necessary for orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping uses sound-to-letter relationships to anchor phonemes in a word's pronunciation to the printed letter strings into long term memory for future retrieval.

It is important to note that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needs to be systematic, explicit and consistent. A sprinkling of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction here and there will not provide the repetition and practice needed to become automatic decoders of print. These skills are also a means to an end and at no point the only literacy instruction necessary to create fluent and proficient readers. However, these skills are not optional, and they lay the foundation on which additional reading components are built.

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In 2000, the National Reading Panel (NRP) identified 5 components of effective literacy instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. In addition to naming these five components, the NRP also concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics instruction needed to be increased in primary grades. While both phonemic awareness and phonics were named separately, these...

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This is a great video to show students beginning to learn Phonemic Awareness in Kindergarten or First Grade. It is a follow-along video so students participate and clap throughout it.

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What skills are typically mastered during the different stages of Kindergarten and First Grade. Additionally, there are examples of ways to assess Phonemic Awareness.

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All assessments should be given one-on-one.

When should it be assessed?

Phonemic awareness assessments should be done three times during the kindergarten and first grade years to help guide instruction.

Examples of assessment questions

* Remember, when a letter appears between slash marks, you should say the letter sound, and not the letter name.

Phoneme matching

Which words sound alike? man, sat, sip (Correct response: sat, sip)

Phoneme isolation – Initial (first) sound:

What's the first sound in "sat?" (Correct response: /s/)

Phoneme isolation – Final (last) sound:

What's the last sound in "sat?" (Correct response: /t/)

Phoneme isolation – Medial (middle) sound:

What's the middle sound in "sat?" (Correct response: /a/)

Phoneme blending:

What word do these sounds make? /h/ – /o/ – /t/ (Correct response: hot)

Phoneme segmentation:

What sounds do you hear in "hot?" (Correct response: /h/ – /o/ – /t/)

Phoneme manipulation – Initial (first) sound:

Say "mat" without the /m/ sound. (Correct response: at)

Phoneme manipulation – Final (last) sound:

Say "mat" without the /t/ sound. (Correct response: ma)

Phoneme manipulation – Substitution:

Say "pig." (Correct response: pig)

Now change the /p/ in "pig" to /f/. (Correct response: fig)

Age or grade typically mastered

Phoneme matching: The middle of kindergarten

Phoneme isolation – Initial (first) sound: The middle of kindergarten

Phoneme isolation – Final (last) sound: Late kindergarten or early first grade

Phoneme isolation – Medial (middle) sound: Late kindergarten or early first grade

Phoneme blending: Late kindergarten or early first grade

Phoneme segmentation: First grade

Phoneme manipulation – Initial (first) sound: First grade

Phoneme manipulation – Final (last) sound: First grade

Phoneme manipulation – Substitution: Middle to end of first grade or early second grade

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An informal assessment of phonemic awareness, including what the assessment measures, when is should be assessed, examples of questions, and the age or grade at which the assessment should be mastered.

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This resource is very beneficial because it contains thousands of books on the topic.

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We just upgraded to a new catalog! Most of our links have been updated, but a few still point to the old catalog. If you are needing to request an item or want to check the current availability, please make sure that the link you are using is taking you to the new catalog. If the link is taking you to "rosi.unk.edu", you will be seeing the old catalog and the information will be outdated. Thank you!

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Research Guides: Handy Topics in the Curriculum Department: Phonemic Awareness Books

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We just upgraded to a new catalog! Most of our links have been updated, but a few still point to the old catalog. If you are needing to request an item or want to check the current availability, please make sure that the link you are using is taking you to the new catalog.

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This website summarizes 10 options of books to help students improve their phonemic awareness, rhyming, and sound discrimination.

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Last updated on August 25, 2020

I love using books to practice building phonological and phonemic awareness skills. These books provide fun and engaging auditory practice in the form of an entertaining read aloud!

There are so many great opportunities to practice phonemic awareness skills during the school day, but we often pass by them because we are focused on other things.

You can use most books to practice a phonemic awareness skill or two but some are just perfect for adding that teachable moment into your day. 👩🏽‍🏫

These phonemic awareness books are fun for you to read, and engaging for your students! I have listed the skills I practice when we read them in my room but many of them lend themselves to more than one type of practice.

Have fun reading them and take advantage of all of those practice opportunities! #doubleduty
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10 Inviting Phonemic Awareness Books Your Students Will Love

Do you know the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness? I used these terms interchangeably for years, but they're actually quite different. Read this post to learn the difference phonological awareness VS phonemic awareness.

Phonological Awareness Books

Since phonological awareness and phonemic awareness activities build on each other, I like to practice a few phonological awareness skills first.

Even if some of your kiddos have mastered hearing and manipulating words, syllables, and onset and rime, it never hurts to use these phonological awareness books as extra practice!

Sound Discrimination

The marvelous monsters love to show off their skills in a silly talent show. For example, purple Pete wears a plaid pullover and performs a puppet show.

Kids will love listening to the silly alliterations in this book! They practice sound discrimination as they listen for each monster's special beginning sound.

It's important for readers to practice sound discrimination at the end of words, too. Fox in Socks is the perfect book to practice end of word sound discrimination.

Kids are captivated by the fun story and will get plenty of practice with this classic Dr. Seuss book.

Warning: these tongue twisters are no joke! Get ready for lots of giggles as you read them! ☺️

Rhyming

These sheep in a jeep get into some deep (muddy) trouble as they travel. Simple rhymes finish each page in a pattern that is easy for students to anticipate.

This beloved book is a great option when practice rhyming because the story is engaging and the rhymes are easily completed by listeners.

In this classic book, a baby llama walks around asking other animals about their mamas. Each page has a riddle that leads to the name of baby animal. The riddles are rhythmic and include wonderful vocabulary as well.

Kids love to "guess" the animal by completing the rhyme. There are a few tricky ones in there which makes it extra fun!

Mrs. Millie is always getting things mixed up. She mixes up similar sounding words by changing the sounds. It's easy to figure out what she's really trying to say if you can find the rhyme.

Kids love trying to figure out which word she's trying to say. There is a ton of phoneme and syllable manipulation in this book which makes it perfect for practice phonemic awareness skills as well.

Note: This is a whole series so if your kids can't get enough of Silly Mrs. Millie, don't worry! There are more books! 👏

Syllables

Some people collect stamps, but Jerome collects words. He likes all kinds: short and sweet words, two syllable treats and multisyllable words that sound like songs. That is why I love using this book to practice syllables.

We can categorize Jerome's favorite words by the number of syllables and make our own list of favorite words that we have collected, too!

This fun (and silly!) book is perfect for practicing syllables. It tells kids to keep a beat as they hear the different words in the book. There are all sorts of animals sounds to practice on. They will love counting the syllables.

The fun rhythm of this book will have kids begging to hear it again and again. (I can tell you this from experience. 😉) You probably won't mind reading it, either, because it is such excellent practice!

Phonemic Awareness Books

Phoneme Manipulation

This billy sook...I mean SILLY BOOK switches around all sorts of sounds. Shel Silverstein uses common phrases and switches beginning phonemes and syllables around.

Kids will have fun catching the mix ups and correcting them. They also may get a kick out of watching you read it. It can be super tricky to get all of the words out! 😂

The Hungry Thing is...you guessed it! HUNGRY! He points at a sign that says "Feed Me" and asks for shmanckases, but no one quite knows what those are. A little boy figures it out. He wants pancakes!

Kids will love telling you what Hungry Thing wants to eat next as they practice changing the phoneme in the word. It's a win-win!

I like to extend this activity with a turn and talk activity. I ask the kids to change their favorite food into a "Hungry Thing" word. This gives them the chance to practice changing phonemes on their own, too!

One day a rooster on a farm wakes up with laryngitis. He needs to find someone else to wake up the farm. He asks Cow for help. Cow tries to say cock-a-doodle-doo correctly but really has trouble with those phonemes!

This adorable book follows Cow as he switches around the phonemes in that tricky phrase. Kids have fun switching them back to help Cow wake the farm up in the morning. 🐄

These phonemic awareness books are not just my favorites. They're my students' favorite books, too! They love the engaging stories, fun rhythm and questions and answers. I love that they are loving books and we are getting extra practice in such important skills. You just can't go wrong with these read alouds!

What other books are perfect to teach phonological and phonemic awareness? Let me know below! 👇

If you're looking for more opportunities to practice phonemic awareness, check out these excellent phonemic awareness videos!

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10 Inviting Phonemic Awareness Books Your Students Will Love

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I love using books to practice phonemic awareness skills. These books provide fun and engaging auditory practice in the form of an entertaining read aloud!

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Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

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Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of individual speech sounds, or phonemes. A child's skill in phonological and phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.

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5 different activities for students in Kindergarten and First Grade. They are are interactive and enjoyed by students.

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"Phonological awareness," "phonemic awareness," and "phonics," are literacy terms we often hear used simultaneously, and maybe even interchangeably! However, as we work with children, helping them to develop a strong foundation of literacy and language skills, we must realize the important distinction between these terms.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate parts of spoken language. Skills are at a listening/auditory and spoken/verbal, level - NO print - spoken words requiring ears only!

It is a broad term and comprised of a group of skills that progress developmentally, but of course, overlap as children mature. As phonological awareness skills develop, children will begin to attend to, discriminate, remember, and manipulate (segment/blend) words and sounds at these levels or chunks:

Sentence
Understanding that the sentence they hear, "Thecatisfat" is comprised of four separate words "The cat is fat".

Word

Understanding the words "cat" and "fat" rhyme.

Understanding two words become one in a compound word: cat + fish = catfish

Syllable
Understanding the word "cat" as one syllable.

Phonemic Awareness
Understanding and manipulating the three sounds in "cat" = /k/ /a/ /t/

Let's take a closer look at phonemic awareness. It is a specific skill under the broad category of phonological awareness. If we put phonological awareness skills on a continuum, phonemic awareness is the most sophisticated and last to develop.

The following is a list of specific phonemic awareness skills. Keep in mind, all of these are done at the auditory/spoken level, NO print:

Recognize words in a set begin with the same sound (cat, cake, kite all begin with the /k/ sound)

Isolate and say the first/last/middle sound/s in a word (cat begins with the /k/ sound and ends with the /t/ sound, etc.)

Blend separate sounds (phonemes) into words (/k/- /a/ - /t/ = cat)

Segment words into sounds (cat = /k/- /a/ - /t/)

Delete/manipulate sounds in spoken words (What is "cat" without the /k/? - "at"

Basically, phonemic awareness skills include learning how to break apart (segment) and combine (blend) the sounds in words. Phonemic awareness should begin in Pre-K with the focus on the simpler phonemic awareness skills of isolation and identifying beginning and ending sounds. Because phonemic awareness is a more advanced phonological awareness skill, development continues into kindergarten and early elementary.

Why are phonemic awareness skills so important?

Well, children who cannot hear and manipulate the phonemes of spoken words will have a very challenging time learning how to relate phonemes to letters when they see them in written words, Phonics. Therefore, Phonological Awareness skills are foundational for Phonics.

What is Phonics?

Phonemic awareness, however, is not phonics.

Phonics skill development focuses on helping children understand the relationship between sounds of written letters, letter combinations, and words. Phonics deals with written language, therefore we need to use our ears AND eyes, where as Phonological Awareness (and phonemic awareness) involves NO print, just listening and saying sounds and words. To keep this straight in my mind, I think about phonological awareness activities as those which can be completed with the eyes closed, while phonics activities require us to see the written letters and words, so, eyes need to be open.

Both phonemic awareness and phonics are interrelated, foundational skills and necessary for reading. However, it is important to understand a foundation of all phonological awareness skills should built before intense concentration is given to phonics.

The Benefits of Phonemic & Phonological Awareness

PreK is the time to begin to lay the foundation for strong reading skills, and it is important to begin by concentrating on phonological awareness skill development. In addition, if we do not help children gain the foundational understanding of sounds that phonemic awareness brings, phonics (assigning a letter a sound, spelling, and reading) will make little sense. And research supports this.

In summary, Phonemic Awareness is critical for reading. It primes readers for mapping speech to print, connecting sounds with written symbols, and also gives children a way to approach sounding out, blending sounds to make and read new words.

Phonological Awareness Activities & Strategies

In Pre-K, Phonological Awareness skills most certainly need to be taught explicitly, but fun extra practice can be woven in anytime.
Activity 1: Games to Play While Lined Up
Here are a few ideas for some simple games to play while children wait in line:

1. Sentence game: say a sentence, "The cat is fat". Tap the first 4 children on the head as you say each word of the sentence. Ask, "How many words?", four! Repeat the sentence, or say a different sentence, as you go down the line of children.

2. Rhyme game: Say a few words that rhyme, "cat, fat, bat". Prompt children to join in the game. You may need to prompt by saying some initial sounds: /p/ - at, /s/ - at, etc. Include silly words (/z/ - at) and blends (/th/ - at)!

3. My Turn/Your Turn syllable count game: (My Turn) Model clapping/stomping/tapping the syllables for objects you see in the classroom (Ceil-ing, floor, ta-ble, com-pu-ter). (Your Turn) Prompt children to imitate you. Ask after each word, "How many syllables?"

4. Repeat the beginning sound game: /c/ - /c/ - cat, /c/ - /c/ - cake, /c/ - /c/ - car. Prompt children to join in with other words.

The Get Set for School curriculum offers many activities that support early Language and Literacy skill development for children in your Early Childhood classrooms.

Here are some additional sample activities and products to explicitly instruct young learners in some key Phonological Awareness skills.
Activity 2: Discriminate rhymes
Each of the four Mat Man books features the beloved character, Mat Man. Rhyming verses in all the books help children discriminate and learn about rhymes.

Mat Man helps students learn about shapes, professions, rhymes, while expanding their imaginations, exploration, and community awareness.

Click here to see more sample pages from the Mat Man Book Series.
Activity 3: Discriminate between environmental sounds and speech sounds
Children learn important social, math, literacy & language concepts as they move and sing to upbeat songs on the Sing, Sound, and Count with Me Music Album

For example, the song "Syllable Sound Off" helps to develop children's understanding of syllables as they listen for and move to identify 2, 3 and 4 syllable words... all in one song!

Rhymes are taught in a fun playful way in the song "Rhyming Riddles". In fact, most songs on the music album include verses with rhyming words!
Activity 4: Identify Sounds and their sources
The Sound Around Box is a versatile classroom tool that will help you teach early language and literacy concepts in a fun and hands-on way. It provides the opportunity for many group activities which will help children develop important social skills as they engage in multisensory play with rhymes, syllables, beginning sounds, alphabet knowledge, letters, word parts, and test their memory skills!
Activity 5: Develop early language, literacy, motor, and social skills
Line It Up engages children in fun interactive activities that develop early language, literacy, motor, and social skills. The set includes a mountable magnetic display bar to hold the Story, Letter, and Coloring Cards.

The 26 Coloring Cards each have simple picture. The picture can be colored, but also used to facilitate a "Syllable Chant" activity. For example, on the "A" card: al-li-ga-tor.

The 26 Picture Cards can be used for phonemic awareness activities as children name each picture and identify those that begin with the target sound. For example:

Show picture side of Letter Card A. Name each picture.

Alligator begins with /ă/. Say it with me, /ă/, alligator.

Does violin begin with /ă/? No, violin begins with /v/.

Does astronaut begin with /ă/? Yes, /ă/, astronaut.

Continue with banana and apple.

Let children circle beginning /ă/ pictures.

All of the Get Set for School products support a variety of learning opportunities for your developing children. The products and activities highlighted shown here are just a snapshot of the many skills these products can facilitate.

To learn more about these and other Get Set for School activities and products, visit our website.

A-Z for Mat Man and Me

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5 Phonological & Phonemic Awareness Activities

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"Phonological awareness," "phonemic awareness," and "phonics," are literacy terms we often hear used simultaneously, and maybe even interchangeably! However, as we work with children, helping them to develop a strong foundation of literacy and language skills, we must realize the important distinction between these terms.

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If students are able to purchase this book, it contains 58 fun activities that help practice phonemic awareness. This source is liable because the authors hold their M.A. in Educational Leadership and a certified Speech and Language Pathologist.

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Phonological awareness & Phonemic awareness activities

It has taken a while but we have finally completed our Phonological Awareness Activities Packet. This packet has been a huge undertaking but we wanted to accomplish a few things with it:

1. Align the phonemic awareness activities on this page below with the Common Core Standards.

2. Create new phonemic awareness activities for the standards we did not have existing activities for.

3. Put all the activities in one download!

What we ended up with is a 58 page Phonological Awareness Activities Download.
The file was so large that we could not upload it to our Download Central Page so we placed it in Katie's TpT Store. Here are some sample pics for you. Click any pic to enlarge.

This is our favorite part about the new download! You'll get a 30-page phonological awareness progression for ways to help your students at the word, syllable, and sound level. Simply cut the page down the middle, punch a whole in the corner, and bind with a metal ring! It's perfect to do with your students when you have a few free minutes...and it's super handy. Click to enlarge the pics.

Head on over to Katie's TpT Store to purchase this packet for just $3 or keep scrolling down for all of our FREE phonemic awareness activities.

Want an easy and effective way to track multiple students' phonological awareness skills? Print off this template! List the names of students in the left hand column and place check marks under the skills when a child has mastered them!

Syllable: Phonemic Awareness Activities

Using different items such as hand clappers, drums, or tennis rackets you can have children determine the number of syllables in a given word. For example, you would tap a drum two times for the word "sister" because it has two syllables. For increased difficulty, tap the drum (any number of times) and have your child think of a word that contains that same number of syllables.

Using the lyrics to "Hickety Pickety," have your child say, clap the syllables, and whisper their name to you.

Write the names of students in your classroom or members of your family. Have you child color a smiley face for each syllable in a given name and make a tally mark for each syllable.

Copy a "Classroom Syllable Graph" for each student in your classroom. Say the name of a student and have them color a square above the correct number of syllables. A fun way to combine phonemic awareness activities and math practice!

Help your child find items in different rooms in your home. Sort them by syllables. Write words (or draw pictures) for each object.

Beginning & Ending Sounds: Phonemic Awareness Activities

Tell your child you are going to teach them a song that will help them discover new words by taking off parts (sounds) of the word. Teach this song and let them fill in the last word. After a few verses using new words, invite the children to sing along. Other possible words to use include:

Beginning Sounds: boat (oat), farm (arm), meat (eat), bus (us), sled (lead), hand (and), & sit (it).

Ending Sounds: hammer (ham), soap (so), little (lit), meat (me), & boat (bow).

Segmenting & blending: phonemic awareness activities

Use these sound boxes to help children segment sounds in words. Simply print, laminate, and cut in half each card. Place one game chip under each box. Students say the name of each picture and then push up a chip for each sound in that word. Great for small group instruction!

Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

Give students a word with 1-4 phonemes (sounds). Have them stand up and touch their head, shoulders, knees, and toes as they are saying the sounds in words. For example, the word "cat" would be /c/ (head), /a/ (shoulders), and /t/ (knees). A great active, phonemic awareness activity for helping students with segmenting!

Tell your child that you are going to teach them a song that will help them hear all of the sounds in a word. Teach this song and let them blend the sounds together to make a word. Sing the song a couple times, substituting a new word each time. Scroll down on this page to open a list of words with 4-6 phonemes (sounds) for ideas!

Place the cards face-up in random order on a flat surface. Have your child put the pictures together. Say a sound for each picture part while slowly sliding the parts away from each other. Then have your child say a sound for each picture part while slowly sliding the parts together. Once they are back together, say the whole word and continue with other picture cards

Using the above template, write words with 1-5 sounds in the left-hand column. Have students count how many sounds they hear in each word and write that number in the middle column. Give your child 5 bean bags and place a basket in front of them (distance depends on their ability to throw). Children throw a bean bag for each sound they hear in a given word. A point is received for each bean bag that makes it into the basket. (Make sure your child is saying the sounds they hear as they throw the bean bag). When they are finished throwing, have them count up their points to determine the grand total.

Place a green, yellow, and red mat on the floor (in that order). Begin by giving your child a word with 1-3 sounds. Have your child say the sounds they hear as they jump from mat to mat. For increased difficulty, move the mats so they are further apart.

This template can be used similar to those of Elkonin boxes for segmenting words into sounds. Give your child a word with 1-5 sounds and have them move a token into a box for each phoneme. It's a good idea to use different colored tokens and make sure your child is moving from left to right, just as if they were reading a word.

Have your child look at each picture and determine the number of sounds in that word. Color a box for each sound.

Here you will find a list of short and long vowel words with 4-6 phonemes (sounds). Before you use this list with your child/class, make sure they have mastered segmenting 1-3 phoneme words. These words can be used with the following phonemic awareness activities for segmenting:

This segmenting activity is easy to do and it doesn't require any materials but your hands! Have your child/class place their hands together. Give them a word. Each time they hear a sound in a word, have them say it and move their hands further apart.

This is the same concept as the segmenting activity above, only using silly putty to stretch the sounds in words. Using the silly putty helps children to visualize words that have a few sounds and words that have many sounds. (Children really get excited when they find words with many sounds, causing the silly putty to break apart).

This way of stretching words is great for students who like movement! Use a yoga mat and begin by explaining that it's important to stretch your body before you can stretch your brain. Give your child a set of directions to stretch their body. For example, tell them to slowly touch their toes, reach high in the air, place arms out to the side, and roll their head slowly. Once they have stretched their bodies, they are ready to stretch words! A fantastic multi-sensory phonemic awareness activity.

Using inexpensive night lights is a great way to help children learn to say sounds in words. Line up the night lights and say a word. Have your child say the sounds in the word as they turn the lights on. Repeat this process with the same word, but have your child say the sounds while they turn off the night lights. (It's always a good idea to teach your child to work from left to right! This typically is best to do in the small group setting when working on 1-4 phoneme words).

Using magnetic bingo chips and a cut-apart egg carton, place a chip in each slot. Give your child a word with 1-6 phonemes and have them pick up a chip while they say each sound. Like in the previous activity, it's best to teach your child to work from left to right.

Rhyming: Phonemic Awareness activities

Rhyme Time Bingo

Check out our new rhyming bingo game to play with children in the small group setting or at literacy centers. Directions are attached!

Want a fun way to help children learn to rhyme? Try this game with 2-4 children...Great for small group instruction and centers! Directions are attached.

By cutting and laminating the following cards, you can provide a fun and easy way to help children increase their rhyming skills.

Each week and new chant or poem is introduced. Students practice reading these poems through various activities and send them home each Thursday to share with family members.

Mystery Bag

Using an old book bag filled with random objects is a great way to help children with rhyming. Find things that are of meaning to you or place objects in the book bag that will make them laugh. See how many words you can think of that rhyme with that object, even if it is not a real word!

Track your class student rhyming progress using the "Rhyming Groups Folder". Glue the following four tabs on the inside of a manila folder, laminate, and use Post-Its to move individual students' rhyming progression.

Can't Hear/Can't Produce Rhymes

Can Hear/Can't Produce Rhymes

Can Hear/Can Produce Some Rhymes

Can Hear/Can Produce Rhymes Consistently

Learning the Difference between letters, sounds, syllables, & sentences: phonemic awareness activities

By enlarging and laminating this template your students can determine the letters, sounds, and syllables in new words you are working on in the classroom. (Kinkos is a great place to have documents enlarged). This helps children visualize that some words might have a lot of letters, but not a lot of sounds and vice versa.

Letter, Sound, Syllable, Word, & Sentence Poster Template

Cut out the cards and glue each to the top of a large poster. Provide your students/child with old magazines and newspapers. Help them cut out uppercase and lowercase letters, sounds, syllables, words, and sentences and glue of the appropriate poster. For "sounds" and "syllables" have your child use pictures of objects. Cut the objects according to the number of sounds and syllables. For example, the word "cat" would be cut into three pieces to represent the sound /k/ /a/ /t/. A great multi-sensory phonemic awareness activity.
Return from Phonemic Awareness Activities Page to Home

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Free downloads for phonemic awareness activities

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I thought this was a great resource because it goes into an immense amount of detail about this topic. This source can be used till Grade 4.

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Research indicates a strong relationship between early phoneme awareness and later reading success, and it links some reading failure to insufficiently developed phoneme awareness skills. Intervention research clearly demonstrates the benefits of explicitly teaching phoneme awareness skills.

Many children at risk for reading failure are in general education classrooms where phoneme awareness training is not part of their reading program. This article presents a set of developmental phoneme awareness training activities that the special educator can integrate collaboratively into existing kindergarten and first-grade reading programs.

Instructional considerations

Before preparing to conduct phoneme awareness activities in a general education setting, the special educator needs to become familiar with the method being used to teach reading and should observe the class in action.

Most of the phoneme awareness activities should not take more than 15 or 20 minutes to complete and should fit the context of the classroom. Although a particular activity can be selected well in advance, the specific words targeted for phoneme awareness should be selected from material used actively in the class, such as a story or picture book that was just read and discussed, the immediate environment, words fitting a thematic unit being taught, or discussions about a field trip.

Phoneme awareness activities work well in classrooms where teachers implement shared reading. Typically, after previewing the text with the class, the teacher reads aloud a large-print text on a chart or in a big book, the teacher and children read the selection together, and then students complete individual activities related to the selection (Holdaway, 1979). Phoneme awareness activities are a natural extension of the shared reading activities.

To be successful, however, the general educator and special educator must plan ahead for sharing time, space, and teaching together in a collaborative effort. The benefits for the children far outweigh any disadvantages for the teachers. The willingness of the special educator to fit the activities to the contexts of the classroom can help diminish any existing reluctance a general education teacher might have toward phoneme awareness training.

Specific guidelines

Teachers need to be aware of the developmental requirements of phoneme awareness activities. For example, when teaching children to partition words into parts, segmenting a compound word into its two parts ("What two words do you hear in cowboy?") precedes segmenting syllables and sounds.

Similarly, identification tasks ("Which one doesn't rhyme - cat, hat, sun?") are generally easier than production tasks ("Tell me the first sound in car"). The difficulty level of most activities can be manipulated by changing the input or response modes. For example, "Find the picture that starts with /r/" will be easier than "What sounds do you hear in robe?" A set of guidelines to keep in mind when planning instructional activities is provided below.

Instructional Guidelines for Planning Phoneme Awareness Activities

1. Identify the precise phoneme awareness task on which you wish to focus and select developmentally appropriate activities for engaging children in the task. Activities should be fun and exciting - "play" with sounds, don't "drill" them.

2. Be sure to use phoneme sounds (represented by / /) and not letter names when doing the activities. Likewise, remember that one sound may be represented by two or more letters. There are only three sounds in the word cheese: /ch/-/ee/-/z/. You may want to target specific sounds/words at first and "practice" beforehand until you are comfortable making them.

3. Continuant sounds (e.g., /m/, /s/, /i/) are easier to manipulate and hear than stop sounds (e.g., /t/, /q/, /p/ /b/). When introducing continuants, exaggerate by holding on to them: rrrrrring. With stop sounds, just pronounce the short "pure" consonant sound one time and without the "uh" sound added at the end, to ensure accurate blending. For example, /b/ should not be pronounced "buh".

4. When identifying sounds in different positions, the initial position is easiest, followed by the final position, with the medial position being most difficult (e.g., top, pot, setter).

5. When identifying or combining sound sequences, a CV pattern should be used before a VC pattern, followed by a CVC pattern (e.g., pie, egg, red).*

*Note: CV = consonant-vowel; VC = vowel-consonant; CVC = consonant-vowel-consonant

Awareness of onset and rime

Phonograms are the common elements in word families (e.g., the letter sequence "and" in sand, hand, band, and land). The initial consonant that changes the meaning of the word is called an onset and the following vowel/consonant combination that remains constant is called a rime. Because an awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes develops before an awareness of phonemes (Goswami, 1994, p. 36), the first set of suggestions focuses on ways to expose children to word play.

Literature

A natural and spontaneous way of providing children with exposure to phonemes is to focus on literature that deals playfully with speech sounds through rhymes. Simple rhyme patterns are easily recalled after repeated exposure, and children will get the idea of creating new rhymes.

In There's a Wocket in My Pocket (Seuss, 1974), initial sounds of everyday objects are substituted as a child talks about the strange creatures around the house, such as the "zamp in the lamp." Children can make up their own strange creatures in the classroom such as the "zuk in my book."

Alliteration is the repetition of an initial consonant sound across several words, such as presented in the alphabet book Faint Frogs Feeling Feverish and Other Terrifically Tantalizing Tongue Twisters (Obligato, 1983).

Assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds within words, is often combined with rhyme, as in "It rains and hails and shakes the sails" from Sheep on a Ship (Shaw, 1989) or in humorous ways such as "The tooter tries to tutor two tooters to toot" in Moses Supposes His Toeses Are Roses (Patz, 1983). Some books include music to go with the rhymes, such as Down by the Bay (Raffi, 1987), in which two children try to outdo one another in making up questions that rhyme, such as "Did you ever see a goose kissing a moose?"

Yopp (1995) presented an annotated bibliography of 44 books for young children that deal playfully with language. She also provided guidelines for using these books in class:

1. read and reread the stories;

2. comment on the language use;

3. encourage predictions of sound, word, and sentence patterns;

4. comment on or elicit specific aspects of sound patterns (e.g., "What sound do you hear at the beginning of all those words?"); and

5. be creative in inventing new versions of the language patterns utilized in the stories.

Word families chart

The exposure to rhymes leads naturally to the use of phonograms and the creation of word family charts. Charts can contain words from one story or a brain-stormed list from the children.

A story that leads naturally to a word family chart is Tog the Dog (Hawkins & Hawkins, 1986), which is constructed so that as each page is turned, a different letter lines up with the rime "og." For example, when Tog takes a jog, the letter "j" lines up with the "og." The children can dictate to the teacher words to be placed on a word family chart. As they begin to develop letter/sound knowledge, they can copy or write the words themselves.

You can use magnetic letters to "create" words for a word family chart. Provide a rime of plastic letters (e.g., at) and have the children take turns placing different letters in the onset position to create new words (e.g., hat, bat, sat, rat). These charts can be used as reference charts (or the children can make their own word families reference book) for spelling and creative writing activities.

Direct instruction

Children who are struggling with recognizing and creating rhymed words may need more direct intervention. Initial rhyme recognition can be reinforced by direct modeling of instances ( nose/ rose) and non-instances ( bed/ car) of rhyming word pairs. The children are then presented other word pairs and asked if the two words sound the same or sound different.

This can be made into a game-like activity by having them respond with a "happy face" card if the words rhyme and a "sad face" card if they don't (or they can use a "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" response). It is important for the teacher to ask a child to repeat the rhyming pairs in this and the following activities to reinforce the verbal production of rhymed words.

Pictures provide visual cues for rhyme recognition and can be used during the modeling phase of instruction. The teacher can then present three pictures and 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 the word being said by the teacher.

Bradley and Bryant (1983) used an activity called "Odd Word Out," which can be done with or without pictures. Four words, three of which rhyme, are presented by the teacher (e.g., weed, bead, pill, seed). The child determines which word is the odd one that doesn't belong with the others.

The game of concentration or memory is a good practice activity for rhyme recognition. Separate pictures (not printed words) of rhyming word pairs (e.g., cat/ bat) are shuffled, and all are placed facedown in a grid pattern. The children take turns turning two cards face-up, trying to match a rhyme pair. If a match is made, the child keeps that pair and takes another turn. If not, the cards are turned facedown and the next child gets a turn.

A summary of activities to heighten awareness of onset and rhyme is offered in the table below.
Awareness of Onset and Rime
Simple phonemic awareness

Isolated sound recognition

As stated by Lewkowicz (1980), "Children should be familiarized with speech sounds in isolation before they attempt to detect sounds within words" (p. 694). Because children are usually unaware that words are made up of individual speech sounds that can be produced in isolation, it is up to the teacher to provide children with a concept of speech sounds.

This is probably best done by associating phonemes with a creature, an action, or an object that is familiar to the child. For example, the phoneme /s/ can be associated with the hissing sound a snake makes - sssssss. A sound personality can be created by calling /s/ the "Sammy snake" sound. Many sounds have natural associations, such as a crowing rooster for /r/, a buzzing bee for /z/, and the "be quiet" sound for /sh/.

Figure 1. An example of pictures of sound personalities incorporating letter-shape association.

Sound personalities can be introduced naturally and in context by selecting a particular sound to talk about that is stressed in alphabet or other books that use alliteration. For example, Obligato (1983) presented "smiling snakes sipping strawberry sodas" for the alphabet letter S. It is helpful to create or provide pictures that represent these sound personalities and to post them in the room as each is introduced. A natural connection can sometimes be made between the sound and the letter, such as presenting a picture of "Sammy snake" drawn in the shape of the letter S or "Buzzy bee" flying in a pattern of the letter Z (see Figure 1).

Besides providing a label to facilitate talking about sounds, the pictures provide self-correcting cues for children engaged in initial sound isolation and sound-to-word matching activities.

Word, syllable, and phoneme counting

Because words and syllables are more salient and more directly perceivable than individual phonemes, activities that involve counting the number of words in a sentence or syllables in a word can be used as initial steps leading to isolated phoneme synthesis and segmentation (Lundberg, Frost, & Peterson, 1988).

Word counting can be done for any sentence selected from a reading or writing lesson. The sentence should be read to the children without being visible. The children listen and place a marker from left to right for each word heard. The teacher can confirm the number of words by showing the printed sentence to the children, pointing to each word as it is read, and having the children touch their tokens in one-to-one correspondence. Or the teacher can reinforce the children's "counting" using auditory input only by repeating the sentence and having them touch each token to confirm the number of words heard.

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, wa- shy). Initially, two-syllable words can be targeted, building up to three. Visible, manipulable representation of sounds also helps to clarify and guide counting and segmentation tasks for beginners (Lewkowicz, 1980).

The marker activity used for word counting can be adapted for use in counting syllables by providing each child with two or three horizontally connected boxes drawn on a sheet of paper. The children place a token in each box from left to right as they hear each syllable in a word. These same activities can be used to count sounds in words.

Sound synthesis

Sound synthesis or sound blending is an essential skill related to later reading ability (Lewkowicz, 1980; Lundberg et al., 1988; Wagner, Torgeson, Laughon, Simmons, & Bashotte, 1993) and one of the easiest phoneme awareness tasks for children to perform (Yopp, 1988).

Sound synthesis can be done using the following sequence: blending an initial sound onto the remainder of a word, followed by blending syllables of a word together, and then blending isolated phonemes into a word.

The teacher can model blending an initial sound onto a word by using the 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 or her own name when it is presented - "It starts with /b/ and it ends with etsy, put it together and it says ." Context can be provided by limiting the words to objects that can be seen in the room or to words from a particular story the children just read. As the children become proficient, they can take turns using the jingle to present their own words to be blended by the class.

Guessing games that utilize words broken into syllables or isolated phonemes provide fun sound blending activities.

One involves using a puppet (perhaps representing a character from a current reading lesson) who speaks "funny" by saying words syllable-by-syllable or sound-by-sound for the children to figure out. Initial clues can be provided by displaying three pictures, one of which is the word being said by the puppet. The puppet can confirm or negate a student response by picking up the picture and saying the word being segmented: "/f/-/i/-/sh/ - I said fish!"

Another is the familiar "What's in the bag?" activity. Instead of describing what is in the bag, the teacher says the word syllable-by-syllable or sound-by-sound and the children guess the word. A correct response is confirmed when the teacher brings the object out of the bag.

Yopp (1992) suggested the use of song games and presented an example to the tune of "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands":

If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word, shout it out!
If you think you know this word,
Then tell me what you've heard,
If you think you know this word, shout it out!

The teacher says a segmented word such as /k/-/a/-/t/, and the children respond by saying the blended word (pp. 700-701).

Sound-to-word matching

Sound-to-word matching is useful as a beginning step in sound segmentation. Basically, sound-to-word matching requires that the child identify the beginning sound of a word.

Awareness of the initial sound in a word can be done by showing the children a picture (dog) and asking the children to identify the correct word out of three: "Is this a /mmm/- og, a /d/d/d/- og, or a /sss/- og?" A variation is to ask if the word has a particular sound: "Is there a /d/ in dog?" This can then 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.

It is easiest to use continuants that can be exaggerated and prolonged to heighten the sound input. Iteration should be used with stop consonants to add emphasis.

Yopp (1992) also suggested the use of songs in sound matching activities. One of several examples she presented uses the tune of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm":

What's the sound that starts these words?
Turtle, time, and teeth.
(Wait for a response from the children.)
/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! (p. 700)

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. The teacher again is cautioned to use the phoneme sounds, not the letter names for these activities.

Identification of sound positions

Establishing that sounds occur in different positions of words - initial, final, and medial - helps some children with the later task of segmenting whole words into isolated sound components.

One method of representing sound positions is to display a picture of a train composed of an engine, a passenger car, and a caboose. Three connecting boxes can be drawn under each component: one under the engine, connected to one under the passenger car, connected to the one under the caboose (use poster board and laminate). Explain that words have beginning, middle, and end sounds just like the train has a beginning, a middle, and an end part.

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. You can then repeat the word and ask the children to identify where they hear the different sounds - "Where do you hear the /g/ in pig?" Slowly articulate other CVC words for them to listen to and have them mark the box under the train that indicates the position of the sound you specify.

Sound segmentation

Segmenting refers to the act of isolating the sounds in a spoken word by separately pronouncing each one in order (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Spector, 1992; Wagner et al., 1993).

Yopp (1988) stated that segmenting the sounds in a word is one of the more difficult simple phonemic tasks for children to perform. Lewkowicz (1980) and Yopp (1992) suggested starting with isolated productions of initial phonemes as a precursor to segmenting entire words. The previous sound-to-word matching and identification of position activities help in early recognition and practice with initial phonemes.

Figure 2. An example of Elkonin boxes used for hearing sounds in words.

Several researchers (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Griffith & Olson, 1992; Lewkowicz, 1980) have used visual and tactile cues based on Elkonin boxes (Elkonin, 1973) to help with phoneme segmentation. A card is prepared with a picture of a simple word at the top. Below the picture is a matrix that contains a box for each phoneme (not letter) in the word (see Figure 2).

The teacher models the process by slowing articulating the word phoneme-by-phoneme while pushing a counter into a box for each phoneme. The children can say the word with the teacher while the counters are being placed. Gradually the children should participate in this "say it and move it" (Ball & Blachman, 1991) activity by taking turns placing the counters in each box while saying each sound in a word. Both the matrix and picture can be eliminated over time so that the children are segmenting the word without visual clues.

Words should be selected from familiar text to ensure a whole-to-part sequence of instruction and to provide the children with contextual cues that link word segmentation to everyday classroom lessons.

Letter-sound association

Many researchers (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Field- Barnsley, 1993; Hurford et al., 1994; Iversen & Tunmer, 1993) have demonstrated the advantage of combining phoneme awareness with letter knowledge in a classroom setting. As stated by Griffith and Olson (1992), "The most pedagogically sound method of phoneme awareness training is one that eventually makes explicit the complete letter-to-sound mappings in segmented words" (p. 518).

All phoneme awareness activities that use tokens or other visual representations of sounds can be modified to include letter- sound associations. As individual sounds are mastered by the children, their corresponding letter names can be introduced and placed on the tokens (magnetic letters or Scrabble tiles can be used) and gradually introduced into the segmentation activities.

At first, only one letter or tile should be provided, and the remainder should be blank. After the child has successfully segmented with one letter or tile, others can be added as new letter names are mastered.

To reinforce letter names, Blachman (1991) played "post office" - the children select a picture, say the initial sound of the picture, and identify the letter represented by the first sound by "mailing" it in the appropriate letter pouch.

A modified game of bingo can provide practice in sound-letter association. The desired letters to be emphasized are selected, starting with two or three, and adding more as the children progress. The letters are printed in random order on cards that have 4-by-4 or 5-by-5 grids drawn on them, one card for each child.

The teacher draws from a container letter tiles matching those on the children's cards. The teacher says the phoneme for the letter drawn from the container (replacing it each time) and asks the children to identify the letter corresponding to the phoneme by placing a marker in the appropriate box on their cards. Any child who fills a row or column can then name the letters aloud.

The practice of invented spelling in a classroom can also be used to make explicit connections between sound segments and letters. Children select words they wish to write but don't know how to spell.

A box is drawn for each sound in the word (remember that one sound may be represented by two or more letters - the word shoes, for example, has only three phonemes, /sh/-/oo/-/z/). A child can fill in the letters he or she hears and knows with the teacher's help. The teacher can fill in any letters the child does not know.

A summary of activities for enhancing simple phonemic awareness is presented in the table below.
Simple Phonemic Awareness

Targeted Skill

Example

Isolated sound recognition

Sammy snake sound says... (/s/)

Word/syllable/phoneme counting

How many (words/syllables/sounds) do you hear in this (sentence/word)?

Sound synthesis

It starts with /l/ and ends with ight, put it together and it says... ( light)
What word am I saying?
Put these sounds together to make a word - /f/-/i/-/sh/.

Compound phonemic awareness

Word-to-word matching

Compound phonemic awareness requires holding a given sound in memory while performing a second operation such as determining whether two words begin with the same sound in a word-to-word matching task (e.g., "Do cup and cake begin the same?"; Yopp, 1988). Byrne (1991) offered several games for practicing word-to-word matching.

1. 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.

2. A version of "snap" uses cards having one picture. The children take turns drawing a card from a face-down pile and placing it in 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.

3. Sound bingo uses bingo cards with pictures that children mark if one of their pictures has the same beginning (or end) sound as the word said by the caller.

Each of these games can be related to other classroom activities by having the children make their own dominoes, snap cards, and bingo cards using pictures cut from catalogs or magazines, or hand drawn and laminated. The pictures selected by the children can represent things related to the literature and themes being covered in class.

Sound deletion

Because sound deletion tasks require manipulation of phonemes in words, they are considered to be more difficult than other types of phoneme awareness tasks.

Cole and Mengler (1994) stated that it is not until a mental age of approximately 7 years that children are able to perform phoneme deletion tasks adequately. Lewkowicz (1980) suggested that sound deletion activities be done after the children exhibit some skill in segmentation and after letter names have been introduced. Because phoneme deletion of medial consonants puts an undue burden on young children's memory, sound deletion should target only initial or final sounds in words.

To introduce the idea of deleting parts of a word, the teacher can show pictures or point to objects in the room that are compound words and demonstrate how each word can be said with a part missing. For example, "This is a seesaw. If I say seesaw without the see, it says saw (give other examples). Now you try it. This is a hotdog. Say hotdog without the dog." An element of fun can be introduced by making it a "Simon says" activity: "Simon says, 'say bookmark without the book.'"

Identification of a missing sound can be accomplished through a "What's missing?" guessing game. The teacher says two words for comparison and asks the children to identify the missing element: "Listen: eat/ meat. What's missing in eat that you can hear in meat?"

Final position deletions can be done in the same way (e.g., "What's missing in play that you can hear in plane?"). The children can be encouraged to make up their own "What's missing?" words for the initial position by referring to the phonograms on the word families charts: "What's missing in an that you can hear in pan ( man, ran, can)."

Identifying the missing element using phonograms tends to be easier than using unrelated words because the initial consonant determines the meaning of the word for the child and the rime remains constant.

The actual task of deleting a sound from a word can be made easier by building on earlier segmentation practice, playing a game of "sound take-away." The teacher models how to orally segment a word into the "target" sound plus "everything else" and then take the target sound away.

A modified version of the sound blending 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/." A sound deletion that results in a "real" word such as deer becoming ear or card becoming car is easier than one resulting in a "nonsense" word such as book becoming ook or sun becoming su (although some children enjoy making "alien" or funny words).

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 says when the second block is removed.

A summary of compound phonemic awareness activities is given in the table below.
Compound Phonemic Awareness
Conclusion

Research has demonstrated not only a predictive relationship between phoneme awareness and reading success, but also a causal relationship. Phoneme awareness that has a positive impact on reading can be developed in children through systematic instruction in kindergarten and first-grade settings. Early training in phoneme awareness should be a priority for those interested in improving early reading instruction and in reducing reading failure.

General and special educators should be supported in their efforts to collaborate on incorporating phoneme awareness activities into kindergarten and first-grade classrooms.

These activities are not intended to replace children's interactions with meaningful language and print, but to be incorporated into classrooms as part of a language-rich environment. Reading aloud, using big books and predictable books, developing language experience charts, and using other language-oriented practices give children valuable reading experiences.

However, by supplementing these experiences with related phoneme awareness activities, general and special educators can draw children's attention to a critical aspect of their language - its phonemic base.

It takes only a few minutes a day to integrate activities that emphasize the sounds of language into the rich, oral language environments we are creating for our children. Those few minutes can result in a lifetime of reading benefits to children who otherwise might not learn to read.

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How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities

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Research indicates a strong relationship between early phoneme awareness and later reading success, and it links some reading failure to insufficiently developed phoneme awareness skills. Intervention research clearly demonstrates the benefits of explicitly teaching phoneme awareness skills. Many children at risk for reading failure are in general education classrooms where phoneme awareness training is not part of their reading program.