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Phonemic Awareness Classroom Activity #1

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Phonemic Awareness Classroom Activity #1

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Initial phoneme identification—Treasure Box Activity

Working with a small group of students, send them on a treasure hunt around the classroom to look for objects starting with a particular sound, for example, /t/. As they look, repeat saying the letter sounds /t/ until they find something they think starts with /t/. Have them place it in a treasure box. Once each child has contributed to the treasure box, review each object's name and if each object begins with /t/ for it to stay in the treasure box.

(95 Percent Group, 2024)

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Blend and Digraph Bingo

Everyone loves BINGO! In this activity, children can practice beginning blends and digraph sounds as they work toward being the first to get five in a row. Each child would be given a picture bingo card. Using cards that have beginning blends and digraphs on them, the teacher would show and give the sound. The children will look for the picture that has the sound and mark it. The first to get five in a row wins Bingo! This is a great activity for small and large groups.

(Education, 2023)

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It can be hard for pre-readers to hear the difference between single consonants and blends. Try this free Bingo game to help your early reader master blends and digraphs!

Hearing beginning blends is difficult for pre-readers and even early readers. How do you help your child hear the difference between a word that starts with /s/ and one that starts with /sp/?

The best way is through activities that require your child to really listen to the sounds without seeing the actual spellings.

My Four knows his beginning sounds without any trouble, but hearing the two distinct sounds in a blend is difficult for him. When he worked on our beginning blends clip cards, I could see that we needed to take things back a step.

And that brings us to...

Blends and Digraphs Bingo

It's a giant set of 27 free bingo boards to help your child hear the sounds of beginning blends (fr, tr, cl, pr, etc.) and digraphs (sh, ch, th, wh, wr).

I played this with my Four, Six, and Seven. Each time I pulled a calling card I had my Four read the beginning blend. At first I had him read the cards the way I teach letter sounds... without a voiced ending. By this I mean that "sn" would be "sssnn" rather than "snuh."

As we played, though, I began to see that it was easier to hear the blend if it was more pronounced. So "pl" became "pluh" and "sn" became "snuh." While I don't recommend doing this with beginning letter sounds (letter m should be "mmm" and not "muh"), it really helped my Four hear the blend in each word.

If you're playing this game at home rather than the classroom, you'll only need a few boards. You might be surprised at how much older siblings enjoy this game. My Six and Seven were anxious to play and played a few more rounds after my Four had moved on.

If it's just you and your early reader, print two boards and play with him.

My favorite thing about this game is that every single blend and digraph on the calling cards is represented on every single board. This way your child can't give up, saying, "I don't have that one." He'll have to keep hunting, because he knows it's there somewhere.

I hope you enjoy these!

I recommend printing on cardstock. If you expect these to get a lot of use, laminating is a good idea.
Looking for more free printables for learning sounds? Even more fun freebies!
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© 2015 - 2016, Anna G. All rights reserved.

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Help your child learn beginning blends and digraphs - with BINGO! - The Measured Mom

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It can be hard for pre-readers to hear the difference between single consonants and blends. Try this free Bingo game to help your early reader master blends and digraphs! Hearing beginning blends is difficult for pre-readers and even early readers.

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What's in the box? Activity

This activity is a great, fun, and engaging way to introduce new vocabulary. Using chants and total physical responses, teachers can capture their attention and incorporate the whole class into the lesson.

(Gill & Gill, 2024)

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ESL Flashcard Games for Kids | What’s in the Box?

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Fluency and Fitness Brain Breaks

This digital resource is an asset for any elementary classroom. It provides educational brain breaks that help students review essential literacy topics while having fun.

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Fluency & Fitness+ - the #1 membership for teachers

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Fluency & Fitness+ has brain breaks, phonics videos, task cards and more for PreK-3rd grade. We combine learning and movement!

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Graphic Organizers/ KWL Chart

KWL charts, which stand for "what I know," "what I want to know," and "what I learned," can help students improve their reading comprehension in several ways. Teachers utilize this to activate students' prior knowledge to apply to the text/topic, develop a purpose as they are being asked what they want to learn from the topic and help children reflect on what they have learned. "This learning strategy is great for helping students comprehend lessons because it encourages them to connect their prior knowledge, their desire to learn more, and the new information they just absorbed." (Storm, 2023)

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Phonemic Awareness Classroom Activity #2

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Phonemic Awareness Classroom Activity #2

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Blending— Shout It Out Song

Learning to blend sounds is crucial for children to improve their skill of reading. This phonemic awareness skill helps children decode unfamiliar words and build their reading fluency.

Using the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.” Use this little chant to get student's attention and interest in blending sounds to make a word.

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!

After singing, the teacher says a segmented word such as /k/ /a/ /t/ and students provide the blended word “cat.”

(95 Percent Group, 2024)

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CVC Flip Book

Utilizing a CVC flip book is an effective way for students to learn consonant vowel consonant words. It is a helpful tool for phonics and reading. CVC flipbooks can help children in various ways such as word building, blending sounds, and rhyming patterns. Teachers can have students create personal books for everyday reference and practice or have a set for small-group instruction.

(Education, 2023)

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Word Walls

Word walls are a prominent feature of classrooms. It serves as a visual reference for students, showcasing words they have learned. Word walls provide a constant visual reminder of new vocabulary, promoting word recognition and independent learning.

An effective word wall should have these qualities:

Word Selection: Choose high-frequency words, thematic words, or words related to current topics or lessons. Include words that are relevant to kindergarteners' lives.

Visual Aids: Include a large, clear print word card with a corresponding picture for each word. This visual representation helps children associate the word with its meaning.

Alphabetical Order: Arrange the word cards alphabetically, making it easy for children to locate specific words.

Interactive: Encourage children to interact with the word wall. They can point to words, use them in sentences, or even take turns being the "Word Wall Helper" who changes the word cards.

(Effective Vocabulary Building Activities for Kindergarten: A Comprehensive Guide, n.d.)

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Repeated Reading

This academic practice has been found to have positive effects on reading comprehension. Repeated Reading is a strategy of rereading or reading a passage several times. Working with the same piece of text multiple times helps children better understand the text as they become more comfortable with its vocabulary. Some classrooms do what they call "shared reading", where teachers give texts children will read and complete activities weekly. Teachers guide the class through the reading on the first or second day for meaning or enjoyment and then rereading with explicit instruction is done on days two through five. Shared reading can help students develop skills such as sight word knowledge, comprehension, background knowledge, oral language skills, and literacy proficiency.

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Retell or Story Sequencing Cards

Retelling and sequencing activities can help children improve their reading comprehension and writing skills. Retelling involves recalling and repeating the events of a story in order, while sequencing is the ability to identify the beginning, middle, and end of a story or event. These activities can help children understand text structure, identify main narrative components, and summarize. They can also help children develop storytelling skills in a spoken format before applying them to writing.

https://www.readingrockets.org/classroom/classroom-strategies/story-sequence#:~:text=The%20ability%20to%20recall%20and%20retell%20the,summarize%20%E2%80%94%20all%20key%20components%20of%20comprehension.

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Empty the Basket Activity:

This is a great activity for learning the differences between separate sounds. Your child has to hear the first letter to decide what to remove from the basket.

Directions:

1. Take a basket and place different objects inside (all with different phonemic beginnings)

2. Ask your child to remove objects using only their first sounds:  “Remove the object that begins with /b/.”

3. As they hold the object, ask them to tell you what the object is called. ("bear")

4. You repeat the object name and then ask them to isolate the beginning sound. ("Bear makes what sound? /b/")

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Starfall is a website suggested by teachers for parents to get children engaged with phonics and reading at home. It has interactive books, songs, and games that children will enjoy.

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At Starfall, children have fun while they learn. Educational games, movies, books, songs, and more for PreK and Kindergarten learners.

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Cooking Together with a Recipe Challenge

Cooking is a hands-on activity that introduces children to a world of flavors and the vocabulary that describes them. From ingredients to cooking techniques, every recipe is a language lesson. This is a great way to get children exposed to unfamiliar terms, and as they cook, ask them to describe the textures, flavors, and processes, expanding their culinary vocabulary.

(Gill & Gill, 2024)

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Read, Read, Read is what most teachers would tell families to do at home to help build their child's fluency. Using the Me, We, You strategy during a reading at home will help model proper pronunciation, reading rate, and expression of reading.

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Five-finger retell

After reading a story together, have your child tell you five things about the story, using her fingers to talk about each one:

1. Characters: who was in the story?

2. Setting: where did the story take place?

3. Events: what happened in the story?

4. End: how did the story end?

5. Favorite character or part of the story

(Comprehension: Activities for Your Kindergartener | Reading Rockets, n.d.)

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How to Practice Phonics With Kids at Home

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Support your child’s reading success at home with these 6 tips on how to teach phonics to kids.

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This toolkit helps teachers and families understand what fluency is and how to support a child's development of fluency with text.

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This article is a great resource for introducing families to the importance of phonemic awareness. This resource discusses its purpose, its role, and how parents can help encourage their children as they learn to read.

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Phonemic Awareness for Parents - Begin Learning

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Phonemic awareness helps kids become stronger readers. Find out how with the early learning experts at Begin!

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Overview

Talking to and reading with your kindergartener are two terrific ways to help them learn new words. Conversations and questions about interesting words are easy, non-threatening ways to get new words into everyday talk.

Use rich language in conversations with your child

Even very young children love to hear and learn new words! Help your child expand their word bank and knowledge of the world by using interesting and vivid words instead of simpler language in your everyday conversations. For example, instead of saying, "this ice cream is good" you might say, "this caramel ice cream is scrumptious."

Read with your child every day

Reading aloud exposes your child to lots of vivid language that is not found in books for beginning readers. When you come upon a new and interesting word, take the time to stop and ask your child what they think that word might mean in the context of the story. Then offer a kid-friendly definition of the word and connect it to a similar word and a shared experience.

Patience!

Word learning and vocabulary growth takes time and patience. Don't expect your child to learn a new word after one conversation or one read aloud. True word learning happens after being exposed to words several times. We all learn about words throughout our lifetime. You're getting your child off to a great start by developing an early interest in words.

Talk about new words during read alouds

Talking to and reading with your child are two terrific ways to help them hear and read new words. Conversations and questions about interesting words are easy ways to get new words into everyday talk. "The book says, 'The boy tumbled down the hill,' and look at the picture! How do you think he went down the hill?"

Sharing a new word with your child doesn't have to take a long time: just a few minutes to talk about the word and then focus back on the book or conversation. Choose which words to talk about carefully - choosing every new word might make reading seem like a chore. The best words to explore are ones that are less common to see in the books your child might read. When introducing new words to your young learner, keep the following four helpful hints in mind:

1. Provide a simple, kid-friendly definition for the new word: Enormous means that something is really, really big.

2. Offer a simple, kid-friendly example that makes sense within their daily life: Remember that really big watermelon we got at the grocery store? That was an enormous watermelon!

3. Encourage your child to develop their own example: What enormous thing can you think of? Can you think of something really big that you saw today? That's right! The bulldozer near the park was enormous! Those tires were huge.

4. Keep your new words active within your house. Over the next few days and weeks, take advantage of opportunities to use each new vocabulary word in conversation. Kids often need to hear a new word in context ten times or more before they "know" that word.

Grocery store vocabulary

The produce section is a great place to hear new interesting word s. Words like rhubarb, asparagus, artichoke, and kiwi are fun to say, and fun to eat. As you introduce each one, use descriptive words to help your child learn. "A kiwi has a fuzzy outside, but the inside is bright green with black seeds!"

Start at the root

Begin with a simple root word, such as push. Ask your child to come up with words they know that contain that word, such as pushing, pushed, pushover, push-up. Talk about how all these words have some shared meaning related to the word push.

Consider the prefix

Numeric prefixes like bi- and tri- are a part of many words kids know and use. Discuss words like tricycle, tricep, triangle. All these words share the prefix tri-, which means three. Can they develop a list of words that begin with the prefix bi- (like bicycle and binoculars)? This gives you a great chance to introduce new words, like bicentennial, bicep, and biped. You can generate similar word lists with the numeric prefixes uni, octo, and cent.

Homonym fun

Homonyms - words that sound the same but have different meanings - provide a great opportunity for word fun. Say a word out loud, and see if your child can generate more than one meaning for the word. For example:

bark: the sound a dog makes ring: jewelry you wear on your finger
ring: the sound a doorbell makes
bark: the covering on a tree

Explore your world

Visits to a museum, the zoo, the botanical garden, historical sites, and even your neighborhood park are terrific opportunities to introduce your child to new words. Spend some time looking at the signage and identifying new words, then connecting them to what you see right there.

"What's another word for ..."

This game helps your child learn there's more than one word for everyday things. For example, look around you and say, "what's another word for couch?" ( sofa, ottoman). Or, "what's another word for cup?" ( glass, mug). You can extend the game by talking about how two things are similar but not exactly alike ( glass, mug). That helps your child learn about the subtle differences in related words.

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Vocabulary: Activities for Your Kindergartener

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Building a large "word bank" is one of the best ways to help children with reading comprehension. Beginning readers use knowledge about words to help them make sense of what they're reading. The more words a reader knows, the more they are able to comprehend what they're reading or listening to.

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Reading is one of the most important components of language learning and education. It forms the basis for learning how to read - only to learn from what we read. While most children gain the fundamentals of reading by the time they are in second grade, not every child develops the ability to read fluently. Reading fluency is more or less a skill that enables the reader to read quickly, accurately, and with expression.

If your child is struggling to read fluently, there are many strategies you can use at home to support this critical, lifelong skill. Don't worry! Any child who struggles with reading fluency can improve with practice, attention, and consistent feedback. Here are a few simple ways to get your kids reading pages and pages of text with absolute confidence.

1. Model fluent reading

Young children are naturally pretty fast learners. The one thing that we often overlook is their ability to learn from others. One of the best ways to improve a child's reading fluency is to model it for him. Let the child see and hear what fluent reading should sound like. Make sure you include plenty of expressions and emotion while reading and model proper phrasing and pacing. Then ask your child to read the same passage in the same style or manner as you did.

2. Stopwatch readings

Another strategy that works for improving reading speed, which is also a major part of fluency, is asking your child to read a given passage in a set time frame. Here's how it's done: Set a stopwatch for one minute, and have your child read a passage with as few errors as possible. Notice where your child stops or breaks his fluency and work on improving those areas. Perhaps there was a word he couldn't pronounce. Ask him to repeatedly pronounce the word after learning the meaning. Then once again, ask your child to read the passage with the timer set to one minute. This time the reading should be faster!

The one minute read works because it is a manageable chunk of time and your child will be able to practice several repeated reads in a row without losing focus or interest.

Use a graph to track the number of words your child read per minute, along with the number of errors and challenging words. Your child will be excited to know he/she is improving, so be sure to celebrate improvements regularly.

3. Choral read aloud sessions

"Choral reading," is when a teacher or parent reads aloud and asks the children to follow at the same pace. Choral reading is another way to show your child what fluent reading should sound like. Choosing a book at the child's independent reading level will make it easier for him/her to keep up with the accuracy and pace.

4. Marked reading

Take a passage and ask your child to read while you silently follow on a copy of that same passage. Mark places where your child made mistakes (mispronunciation, skipped words, etc.) and keep practicing these words and passages. This can be done during the stop watch reading exercise or a read aloud activity.

To track progress, mark the number of errors and challenging words each time the passage is read. Again, remember to celebrate progress with prizes and/or praise.

5. Re-read favorite books

Always encourage your child to re-read favorite books. Some parents or teachers discourage children from reading the same books again and again in an attempt to expose them to new information. However, constantly reading new material doesn't help reading fluency at all. In fact, the more accustomed to reading a particular book your child is, the more fluent he becomes at reading it. This gives them the confidence, accuracy, and speed needed to read fluently without focusing on just reading and instead more on comprehending and mimicking expressions.

Lastly, the best way to improve children's reading fluency is by encouraging them to read more often while keeping speed, accuracy, and expression in mind. The more they read, the better they get! Modeling positive reading behavior sets the tone for reading in your household.
Martin Berk is a well-trained personal tutor hailing from Los Angeles. He works as a senior editor at an online company offering the services of expert coursework writers UK . He's also an avid reader and a wannabe blogger with keen interest in teaching, tech and education, etc.

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5 ways parents can increase reading fluency | Reading Partners | Reading Partners

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Reading fluency is a practiced skill. Parents can help their kids increase reading fluency by using these easy, at-home strategies.