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Phonological Awareness:   What You Need to Know 

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Phonological Awareness:   What You Need to Know 

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Most kids don't need to be taught phonological awareness. They pick it up by being exposed to a rich language environment. But some kids need to learn the skills through explicit instruction and practice.

Many teachers teach phonemic awareness in kindergarten and early first grade. The best way to teach these skills is by using structured literacy instruction. This type of step-by-step instruction teaches skills in a logical order.

Kids start by rhyming and identifying beginning sounds in words. They end by learning to add, subtract, and substitute sounds to make new words.

Learn more about structured literacy .

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Most kids don't need to be taught phonological awareness. They pick it up by being exposed to a rich language environment. But some kids need to learn the skills through explicit instruction and practice. Many teachers teach phonemic awareness in kindergarten and early first grade.

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Students love to control the train by choosing the correct tunnel in this interactive game. They also practice rhymes by matching the picture in the cloud to a rhyming picture above the tunnel. In between tunnels, they can control the speed of the train which is just a fun bonus.

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Play Sesame Street games with Elmo, Cookie Monster, Abby Cadabby, Grover, and more!

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In this silly syllables game, players listen to the word and move it to the box with the matching number of syllables.

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Syllables

Syllables play an important role in spoken English in that they greatly influence the rhythm of the language, its poetic meter and its stress patterns. Syllables are also important very early on as their mastery dictates a child's success in reading. Kids enjoy learning about syllables using fun online games. These syllable games teach children how to recognize syllables and how to use them properly in reading and writing. Many teachers have even started using online games to assist in their classroom teachings. Online syllable games can be a great tool for the classroom while teaching language arts lessons.

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Syllables play an important role in spoken English in that they greatly influence the rhythm of the language, its poetic meter and its stress patterns. Syllables are also important very early on as their mastery dictates a child's success in reading. Kids enjoy learning about syllables using fun online games.

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In this game, players practice sound discrimination by listening to the middle sound in a each word. The monster then gobbles up the correct word after it is clicked.

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Help Gonk gobble up the word with the same vowel sound as the featured word.

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They provide a great visual scaffold for students to blend without pausing between the letters and break words up into phonemes.

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This post may contain affiliate links, and I will earn a commission if you purchase through these links. Please read the disclosure policy for more details.

After years of working with dyslexic kids, I have several reading strategies for struggling readers that I always turn to because of their success. The best strategies are all multi-sensory because those are the most effective for all struggling readers, especially those with dyslexia.

Elkonin boxes are an effective multisensory strategy that builds and strengthens phonological awareness. It's my favorite reading strategy to help struggling readers with segmenting and blending, one of the best dyslexia interventions for phonics and decoding that all students can use.

What are Elkonin boxes?

Elkonin boxes are sound boxes that are used to segment words into individual sounds.

Each box represents one sound, and as students go from one box to the next, they place something in the box to represent that sound in the word.

There is actually a bit of research that supports the use of Elkonin boxes:

Blachman, B. A., Ball, E. W., Black, R., & Tangel, D. M. (2000). Road to the code: A phonological awareness program for young children. Baltimore: Brookes.

Clay, M. (1993). Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training. NH: Heinemann.

Elkonin, D. (1971). "Development of Speech". In A.V. Zaporozhets and D. B. Elkonin (Eds.). The Psychology of Preschool Children. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Ellis, E. (1997). How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Reading Intervention with Elkonin Boxes

Blending and segmenting words are two skills many of my students struggle with. Often, they can sound out each letter but are unable to blend the sounds together to say the word or they struggle to break words up into phonemes.

Elkonin boxes provide a great visual scaffold for students to blend without pausing between the letters and break words up into phonemes. It builds phonological and phonemic awareness and helps students visualize phonemes.

Students are required to break up the word into sounds instead of focusing on letters. This helps them see that many sounds are made of more than one letter.

Then they can blend these broken up sounds to form a word and work on blending skills.

I have found this strategy to be the most effective with my students and am able to remove the visual and they can still apply the strategy on their own.

Elkonin Boxes Printable

I created my own Elkonin box printable template with color aids and a blending arrow to help students blend the sounds. The colors are especially helpful for students who struggle with tracking and make inversion and omission mistakes when reading and writing.

I use this template with phonogram cards, letter tiles, or write phonograms directly on it. I put the page in a sheet protector and use the ultra fine dry erase marke r s on them.

How to use Elkonin boxes

Segmenting: The student is provided a picture or listens to a word. The student repeats the word and segments the sound. It may help to ask students to stretch out the word. The student places a tile/letter in each box for each phoneme as they sound out the word. This makes a great whole class or one-on-one intervention. For example, with the word /toad/, the student would place 3 manipulatives into the boxes for the 3 sounds /t/ /o/ /d/.

Blending: Write or place phonemes in each box and ask the student to use tiles or a finger to sound out each phoneme and blend the sounds together. They can slide their finger under the boxes, starting from the left, blending each sound into the next to say the word.

I sometimes use color-coded letter tiles for this, but my favorite is using phonogram cards since they have the whole phoneme on one card. You can easily use this as an independent activity for sounding out words.

Spelling: The student listens to a word and writes the correct grapheme in each box.

Watch below some of the different ways I use Elkonin boxes with my students.

Below are the phonics cards I use with sound boxes and for many other phonics activities.

Below is my word mapping template for segmenting and blending. This template incorporates Elkonin boxes along with visual, auditory, and kinesthetic methods to improve decoding and blending.

So now you know how to use Elkonin boxes as a decoding strategy and reading intervention both in the classroom and as a reading tutor. Of all the reading strategies for decoding using Elkonin boxes is my favorite.

Elkonin boxes help build phonemic awareness, which is where many struggling readers have deficits. This post is full of multisensory phonemic awareness activities.

Check out the other products in my shop for struggling learners!

If you're looking for more tips on teaching reading to struggling learners, check out these other posts:

Want to remember this? Save Reading Strategies for Struggling Readers to your favorite Pinterest board!

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Elkonin Boxes - My Favorite Reading Intervention

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I'm sharing my favorite reading strategy for blending sounds plus a freebie download! Free Elkonin boxes template - dyslexia strategies, multisensory reading - Elkonin boxes - reading fluency

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Sound walls are an excellent way to explicitly teach the phonemes.

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This post may contain affiliate links, and I will earn a commission if you purchase through these links. Please read the disclosure policy for more details.

It's time to ditch word walls for sound walls. Sound walls are based on the science of reading, and are an excellent way to explicitly teach phonemes. They are highly effective, especially for struggling readers, and make a lot more sense than word walls. Sound walls can be used in primary grades and with older students. The sounds you display may differ at times with different groups, but a sound wall is helpful for all ages.

SCIENCE OF READING QUICK START GUIDE

What is a sound wall?

A sound wall is a place where the different speech sounds (phonemes) are displayed. Instead of the traditional word wall, where words are displayed on a wall organized by their first letter, you display the different speech sounds using phoneme cards and organize words based on their sounds.

The phonemes are often displayed in specific groups, but they don't have to be. There is a consonant sound wall and a vowel sound wall, sometimes called a 'vowel valley'. Often, a list of the different spellings for each sound is included under or next to the phoneme cards, and sometimes a word list is also included. Good sound walls also include mouth formation visuals so students can see what their lips, teeth, and tongue should be doing to make that sound.

Benefits of a sound wall

Again, I refer back to the science of reading. Students need to master phonemic awareness to become fluent readers. Matching speech to print is critical and a sound wall is one of the best ways to support this.

Benefits of a sound wall include:

explicit instruction of phonemes

builds orthographic mapping

provides consistent review of sounds

provides a visual reference for students in the classroom

improves spelling

improves decoding

Why a sound wall is better than a word wall?

Grouping words by their sounds instead of letters is more effective at teaching reading and spelling. Students learn that one sound can be made using different graphemes, and it helps to teach spelling patterns. In 2000, The National Reading Panel found that explicitly teaching phonemes was a critical component of effective reading and spelling instruction.

Louisa Moats, the author of Speech To Print (which I highly recommend all reading teachers get a copy of), states that "without awareness of the speech sounds that letters represent, one cannot match letters to sounds and read unfamiliar words."

How to introduce a sound wall

Sound walls can be introduced at any time, and the sooner the better! You introduce a sound wall using the sounds your students already know, even if it's just a few.

How to set up the phoneme sound wall cards

Put up the phoneme cards for the sounds they know, and list the different spelling patterns for that sound by the card. With your students, add familiar words using those spelling patterns for that sound under the card.

There are voiced and unvoiced consonant sounds, and then you also have vowel sounds. Voiced sounds are the sounds made from the voice box. unvoices sounds do not vibrate the vocal cords. Say the /s/ (unvoiced) and /z/ (voiced) sounds and you will notice the difference.

Consonant Sounds

Stops - puff of air comes our of your mouth when making these sounds

Unvoiced: /p/, /t/, k/

Voiced: /b/, /d/, /g/

Nasals - you feel these vibrate inside your nose

/m/, /n/, /ng/

It's recommended to keep nasal sounds out when segmenting words because of how it changes the vowel sound, making it a more nasal sound.

Fricatives - lots of vibration and 'skinny air'

Unvoiced: /f/, /th/ ( thumb), /s/, /sh/, /h/

Affricates - in between a fricative and stop

Unvoiced: /ch/

Voiced: /j/

Glides - very airy

Unvoiced: /wh/ (more common in British English)

Voiced: /w/, /y/

Liquids - feel like they fill your mouth up

/l/, /r/

These attach to vowels and alter them, so try not to use them when segmenting.

Vowel Sounds

There are 19 vowel sounds, and they are usually represented in a V shape to mimic the motion of your chin as you make these sounds.

This is better represented in an image so reference the Vowel Valley charts above and below to see the sounds.

How to use a sound wall in the classroom

Once you have set up your sound wall, you can introduce new sounds explicitly.

1. Introduce one sound at a time.

The specific order doesn't really matter, but you can use this as a guide. The key is not to introduce multiple sounds at once.

5 questions to ask when introducing a new sound

There are a few questions you want to ask about sounds when teaching them to your students:

1. What are my lips doing?

2. What are my teeth doing?

3. What is my tongue doing?

4. What is my voice doing?

5. How is the air flowing?

When students are making a sound, go through these 5 questions. Model these for your students to they can try to mimic you. Some phoneme card sets include the visuals of the mouth to help with this.

I give my students a small mirror so they can see what their lips, teeth, and tongue are doing. This is really helpful for them to notice the slight differences in the phonemes, especially when working on vowel sounds.

Don't add a schwa sound!

It's very important to correctly model the sounds. One mistake many people often make is adding the schwa (the /uh/ sound) after a consonant. For example, T makes the sound /t/ but sometimes people add an /uh/ and say /tuh/. It's very important we're not adding that /uh/ sound when teaching phonemes.

2. Don't introduce similar sounds in sequence.

Because some sounds are very similar, it can be confusing for students to learn them in sequence. This is often the case with short e and short i. Although the overall sequence for teaching all the phonemes doesn't really matter, this is the one thing you want to keep in mind when planning out the sequence you'll be teaching.

3. Display only the sounds you have taught.

As you introduce new sounds, you add those to your sound wall. Don't put up a full sound wall with all the sounds at the beginning of the school year!

4. Add words with the different spellings of that sound - but only the spelling patterns students have learned.

As you introduce new sounds and spelling patterns, add words next to or below the phoneme card. This helps students remember that different spelling patterns make the same sound.

5. Use the sound wall for quick daily review.

Every day, take a few minutes to quickly go through the sounds on the sound wall before introducing any new sounds, if doing so.

6. Show students how they can use the sound wall as a reference for reading and writing.

Model for students how they can use the sound wall to help them decode and spell words. You can also provide them with a mini sound wall that they can have in their desk or notebook.

Tip: If you want to see a great free presentation on sound walls, I suggest Michelle Trostle's Sound Walls 101. She explains each step of the sound wall, the sound types, and makes it all come together for anyone new to sound walls.

Where to find sound walls?

You can certainly make your own by printing out phoneme cards and laminating them. You'll need to add example words for each sound as well, so flashcards with a picture of the word are best for this.

If you prefer a ready-made set, Tools 4 Reading is an excellent option, but pricey. I also created my own sound wall and mini sound walls (pictured below), which you will need to print, laminate, and cut. This is much cheaper than the Tools 4 Reading set.
Shop my sound wall resources here.
Here are how some of my sound walls are being used in classrooms:

Special education teacher Mikayla Jorgenson's wound wall:

SCIENCE OF READING QUICK START GUIDE

Want to remember this? Save Why You Should Switch To A Sound Wall to your favorite Pinterest board!

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It's time to ditch word walls for sound walls. Sound walls are based on the science of reading, and are an excellent way to explicitly teach the phonemes.

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Kids will love telling you what Hungry Thing wants to eat next as they practice changing the phoneme in the word.

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👾The Hungry Thing Classic books (Read Aloud book for kids) Rhyming

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Jerome likes all kinds: short and sweet words, two syllable treats and multi-syllable words that sound like songs. Great book to practice syllables.

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The Word Collector - By Peter H. Reynolds | Children's Books Read Aloud

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Great book to practice end of word sound discrimination.

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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.

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In this book, they practice sound discrimination as they listen for each monster’s special beginning sound.

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A fun, movement-filled video where students practice phoneme substitution.

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Let's Make a Change (Pre-K) Phoneme Substitution

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Students sing along and practice segmenting and blending words.

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Stretchy the Word Snake | Phonics Song for Kids | Segmenting and Blending Words | Jack Hartmann

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Good video for an introduction to syllables. Students practice clapping each “beat” in the words.

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Fun phonemic awareness song for students to hear sound patterns in language.

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Party In The Jungle | Fun Phonemic Awareness Song | Jack Hartmann

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Good attention-getter song for
when you’re teaching rhymes.

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The Big Pig Song - Hooked on Phonics: Learn to Read