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This website lists free apps that can be used to help develop children's phonic proficiency.

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Phonics instruction helps kids learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language. Children are taught, for example, that the letter b represents the sound /b/, and that it is the first letter in words such as bubbles, ball, and baby. These Phonics Apps for Kids help kids practice with basic phonics skills, including recognizing the letters of the alphabet, alphabet matching, and word building.

The Best Phonics Apps for Kids
Oz Phonics
This app is filled with fun games that work on letter-to-sound and sound-to-letter skills which are necessary skills for helping your child learn how to decode and work out new words.

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Alphabet Sounds Word Study
Based off of the 'Words Their Way' approach through sorting, finding, spelling, and writing words. This amazing app has four levels of interactive play that work on beginning, middle, ending, and diagraph/blend sounds. This is the perfect app for younger kids!

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hip hop hen: abc flashcard songs
Teach sounds and diagraphs with fun songs using this app! 'abc flashcard songs' has been specifically devised for children to learn the phonetic alphabet as well as new vocabulary with 35 interactive phonic songs.

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The Joy of Reading
The Joy of Reading is a comprehensive collection of 9 multi-level games that are designed to encourage early reading. An array of colourful animals supports the child according to their readiness as they are exposed to systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics.

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Montessori Letter Sounds
Montessori Letter Sounds works off of four stages for kids: I-Spy Games, Letter Sounds, Mix-n-Match, and Sound it Out. In each step, children will find a learning activity and a game to help them put their learning into practice. Self-correction is encouraged throughout the app to increase self-confidence. The system keeps track of marbles won by each player. Marbles are used to unlock games and levels and to stimulate learning.

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ABC House
Expose your child to the world of everyday objects! This award-winning ABC Series teaches children new words through sight, sound & touch. Let them iron a shirt, use a kettle, fluff a pillow & more through beautiful pictures, lively videos, and interactive scenes.

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Rosetta Stone® Kids Lingo Letter Sounds
My kids love this simple, but well-executed app! This preschool learning game reinforces English reading skills while simultaneously introducing a new language. It's a fun way to help make your child a stronger, more confident reader.

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Wee Sing & Learn ABC
Great music. Great characters. Great learning! Kids will love interacting with the animated characters while learning letters and beginning to read. Every letter of the alphabet has its own special song.

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Eye Spy Touch
Based on the popular classic car game 'I spy with my little eye' - Eye Spy Touch is perfect for developing thinking skills while on the move. Your child will learn phonics skills, logic & reasoning, memory skills & matching and they will develop their reading and listening abilities.

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Hooked on Phonics Learn to Read - Preschool Alphabet and Letter Sounds
Learn to Read Pre-K is the first level of Hooked on Phonics' digital reading program. Part-musical-variety-show, part-interactive-game, and all fun, it's an amazing app that will keep everyone laughing and learning-all the way from Ankle to Zither.

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Share This!
Have a favorite Phonics App that we missed? Share it with others in the comments!

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Phonics instruction helps kids learn the relationships between the letters of written language and the sounds of spoken language. Children are taught, for example, that the letter b represents the sound /b/, and that it is the first letter in words such as bubbles, ball, and baby.

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This website provides worksheets that educators can download for free in phonics instruction.

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Find Tons of Fun with Phonics Worksheets

Most parents probably don't remember that there's a lot that goes into creating a competent learner-it's certainly not an overnight process. One of the most critical steps along the literacy journey is teaching young learners how words correlate with sounds, which is known as phonological awareness.

Our phonics worksheets are a great tool to use to help your child develop this vital skill, as they cover such concepts as rhyming words, the sounds each letter makes, and beginning and ending consonant blends. And with various puzzles, games, and hands-on activities (like cut-and-paste rhymes), your child will never tire of practicing her phonics.

Beyond our supply of dozens of phonics worksheets, consider using your child's everyday surroundings to speed up the learning process. For example, sit her down with her favorite coloring books and see if she can identify all the objects that start with "B" as she flips the pages. Or next time you go for a walk, point out various objects you see like "dog," "tree," and "car," and see if she can come up with a rhyming word for each. When she does, you'll see her eyes light up and know she's well on her way to phonics proficiency.

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Most parents probably don't remember that there's a lot that goes into creating a competent learner-it's certainly not an overnight process. One of the most critical steps along the literacy journey is teaching young learners how words correlate with sounds, which is known as phonological awareness.

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This article provides information on phonemic awareness development, phonics role in phoneme awareness, assessments, effective techniques, etc.

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These activities are available for purchase and incorporate elements of STEAM while teaching phonemic awareness.

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Phonemic Awareness Activities | STEM Activities

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Looking for a resource to bring STEM into your phonics skills or word work stations? Sound Kits are just that! They are phonics task activities that incorporate STEM and provide students an opportunity to create and apply phonemic awareness skills through higher

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Research Based Reading Instruction for Phonemic Awareness 

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Research Based Reading Instruction for Phonemic Awareness 

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This resource provides examples that are research based and provide benefits to Kindergarten level students.

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Phonemic awareness is an important skill to teach kids who are getting ready to learn to read or who are struggling to get the hang of basic reading. Phonemic awareness is an understanding of phonemes and how they work together to create words.

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that can be differentiated in a word. For instance in the word "cat," the phonemes are the "c" sound, the "short a" sound, and the "t" sound. A child who possesses phonemic awareness can segment sounds in words (for example, pronounce just the first sound heard in the word cat) and blend strings of isolated sounds together to form recognizable word forms.
Side Note: I am aware that phonemic awareness is not the only approach to teach reading or the best approach for every child. Some children never develop an understanding of how letters make certain sounds or how those sounds blend together to make whole words. Some children who read, learn through memorization of word shape, order of letters, etc. However, research indicates that early teaching of phonemic awareness before actual reading is introduced, and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness for children who are struggling to get the basics, is highly beneficial and can actually prevent reading problems down the road. If phonemic awareness training is not working, we naturally try other approaches.
What is the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics?
Phonemic awareness is an understanding about spoken language. Children who are phonemically aware can hear the word (b - a - t) said in three separate sounds and tell you it is bat. They can tell you all the sounds in the spoken word dog. They can tell you that, if you take the last sound off cart, you would have car.

Phonics, on the other hand, is knowing the relation between specific, printed letters (including combinations of letters) and specific, spoken sounds. You are asking children to show their phonics knowledge when you ask them which letter makes the first sound in bat or dog or the last sound in car or cart.

Recent longitudinal studies on reading have demonstrated that the acquisition of phonemic awareness is highly predictive of success in learning to read, and to decode (i.e., sound out a word, blend it together to figure it out) in particular. If children understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into words, they are able to use letter-sound knowledge to read and build words. To read more about phonemic awareness and how it relates to reading acquisition see Phonemic Awareness and the Teaching of Reading A Position Statement from the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association.

Below are helpful strategies for teaching phonemic awareness.
1-Show printed material to your child and talk about the sounds and structure of the words:
Research suggests that the greatest impact on phonemic awareness is achieved when there is interaction with print, along with paying specific attention to phonemes, sound/word structure. Seeing the words, hearing the sounds, and studying the structure with a coach (parent, teachers, etc.) allows them to make the connection between what they see and hear, a crucial skill for reading. It is also helpful to point to each letter and say each sound.

2 - Play letter games/phoneme substitution games:
Research shows that letter/sound games help develop phonemic awareness. Here are some game ideas:

Take turns thinking of a word. Have the adult and child work together to say each sound in the word. Write down the word (adult or child) and say each sound individually pointing to the letter(s) that make that sound.

Pick a word and take turns switching the first sound in the word to see how it changes the word or switch the last sound to see how it changes the word and sound (e.g., turn cat into bat or pop into pod).

Put letters on index cards (e.g., give your child a, t, and c and ask them to arrange them into cat, and talk about each sound-you can do this with a variety of words-rat, pot, bed, mat, etc.).

Play a rhyming game. Take turns thinking of words that rhyme with cat, dog, big, etc. Look at the words, talk about the structure and what makes them rhyme.

Play the song lyric game by changing a phoneme in a song to see how it changes the meaning of the lyrics. For example, "Pop Goes the Weasel" could be changed to "Hop Goes the Weasel." After changing the lyrics talk about how changing a phoneme gives the song a different meaning.

Related Article: 10 Fun Activities to Teach Your Child Letter Sounds 3 - Use auditory, visual, tactile (touch), and kenisthetic (movement) representations of sounds to teach phonemic awareness:
Many successful training studies include concrete representations of sounds to help children understand how to manipulate sounds in a word (e.g., Ball & Blachman, 1991). For instance, auditory cues are in play when children are asked to clap the number of syllables they hear in a spoken word. (Let's clap the sounds in cat!)

Or you could use visual/tactile cues like blocks or chips to represent each sound in a word (e.g., writing each sound or letter on each chip and seeing how you could manipulate the chips to change the words or letters). How about making letters out of play-doh and using those letters to create words, switch sounds around, etc.).

Kinesthetic cues are used when children jump as they repeat sounds, say a rhyming word, or say each sound in a word. How about using your body to make letters (give me a C, give me an A, give me a T!).

Model for your child how to clap the sounds or syllables in a word, jump while saying letter sounds, or use play-doh or blocks to manipulate or change words around.

4 - Provide Early Writing Activities:
Research also indicates that early writing activities are helpful for developing phonemic awareness. Let your child guess how to spell words. If they are correct, talk about why. If they are incorrect, provide guidance on what letters need to be changed and why.

If they can't write letters yet, have them tell you what letters they think would make up a word, or use play-doh, magnetic letters, blocks or the computer to make words. Show your child how to take your thoughts and put them on paper. Use simple sentences like "I am hungry" or "I love cats!" I also love using dry erase boards for writing practice!

5 - Practice at Home Before School Starts (if you didn't do this it is okay-just start practicing now):
Research shows that children who are frequently exposed to print and phonemic awareness activities at home prior to starting school have higher levels of phonemic awareness. Parents can model phonemic awareness by reading aloud to their children, talking about the spelling, structure, and sounds in a word; showing their child how to write a word while saying the sounds; or leading games that incorporate letter and language play. Give your children opportunities to practice early reading skills by talking, singing, rhyming, and playing guessing games.

We also know that many kids love the IPAD and do well with fun, interactive computerized games! A great app to practice phonemic awareness is Kindergarten Reading,Tracing, and Spelling-Learn to Read First Words School Adventure!
Keep Your Cool
Remember to always stay calm when working with a child or student, even if you think they should be getting something that they are not getting. If you get frustrated with them, they may start to feel anxious, angry, inferior, stupid, etc. which will lead to a less productive learning session. Keep practice sessions short (5 to 10 minutes for younger children or children who get easily frustrated and 10 to 15 minutes for older children or children who can work for longer periods without frustration), unless the child is eager to keep going. For suggestions on ways to encourage children to complete tasks or activities they do not want to do, read 3 Ways to Use Timers to Encourage Homework and Chore Completion and How to Use Schedules to Improve Children's Behavior.
Video Presentation
Do you teach phonemic awareness? What strategies do you like to use?
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You might also be interested in: Effective Program Helps Young Children Learn to Read
Here Are Some of Our Favorite Tools for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

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5 Research-Based Reading Strategies for Teaching Phonemic Awareness: An Early Reading Skill

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Phonemic awareness is an important skill to teach kids who are getting ready to learn to read or who are struggling to get the hang of basic reading. Phonemic awareness is an understanding of phonemes and how they work together to create words. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that can be differentiated in a word.

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This website provides insight into the fundamentals and definitions of all elements encompassing phonemic awareness.

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How to Teach Phonological Awareness Skills

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How to teach phonological awareness skills in your preschool, pre-k, or kindergarten classroom. Hands-on activities to make learning fun.

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This website provides teachers with apps designed by professionals in a game format. This app also can be utilized to assess student knowledge in phonemic awareness.

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As parents, we all want our children to be successful in the process of learning to read. There are many things parents can do prior to that point in order to set their children up for success. One of the most important is to develop your child's phonemic awareness. Research shows that phonemic awareness is the number one predictor of a child's success at reading. It makes sense to approach the development of this skill in many different ways, including apps! Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in words. This is done through activities that help the child break those sounds apart, identify the individual sounds, and then change a sound in a word ( cat to bat). Check out these apps that help your child develop phonemic awareness.

This app was designed by a speech language pathologist and covers the different parts of phonemic awareness through activities in a room that looks like a science lab. The activities cover skills such as rhyming, blending sounds, and counting syllables; however, the app does not provide any type of reward or entertainment value. Even when children successfully complete the activities, there are no rewards or free play. The app would be great as an assessment tool for parents or teachers, and the app does record your child's scores and progress. The app also allows for tracking of multiple students. The app costs $19.99 and is appropriate for children ages 3-6.

Dora ABCs Vol 3 takes your child to a frog fiesta while helping them blend and change sounds to make words. The phonics games have your child blend simple three-letter words together by themselves or with the support of tapping the letters to hear the sounds. Drag and drop the matching picture next to the word. Then the app gives you a new word, and you have to change the initial sound to build the new word; for example, change car to jar. The frog games that your child can play after the phonics practice keep children interested in the app. This app is not very long but practices important early pre-reading skills. The app costs $1.99 and is appropriate for children ages 4-6.

Monkey Word School Adventure uses mini-games to help kids get started on the road to reading. Games include spelling, letter identification, rhyming, and much more. Kids love the fast-paced and engaging activities. Children are rewarded with special pieces to add to their own terrarium. Parents get so much value out of the descriptive settings page that break down the learning in each mini-game. The app auto-adjusts based on your child's play or gives the controls to the adults for customizing the app. Either way, you will know what your child is working on! The app costs $1.99 and is appropriate for children ages 4-6.

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Develop Phonemic Awareness with These Educational Apps

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As parents, we all want our children to be successful in the process of learning to read. There are many things parents can do prior to that point in order to set their children up for success. One of the most important is to develop your child's phonemic awareness.

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These apps provide teachers with various activities to instruct phonemic awareness.

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This is one of the best for Phonemic Awareness. Several levels and lots of practice.

Great free app that practices beginning, middle and end sounds!

Sound Sorting-Beginning Sounds

Great Practice for sorting beginning sounds. By Lakeshore-Quality

Great sound practice with customization.

Covers Concepts of Print, phonemic awareness, and word recognition

Pocket Charts- Match Beginning Sounds

Pocket Charts- Match Ending Sounds

This company has several other pocket chart activities

28 different rhyming groups. You can't go wrong with apps from Abitalk.

Blending

Blend and segment 3 sounds

For Blending and Segmenting

Blend and segment 3 sounds

Consonant Blends- 3-4 sounds

Blend and segment longer words

This is one of the best for Phonemic Awareness. Several levels and lots of practice.

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This is one of the best for Phonemic Awareness. Several levels and lots of practice. Great free app that practices beginning, middle and end sounds! Sound Sorting-Beginning Sounds Great Practice for sorting beginning sounds. By Lakeshore-Quality Great sound practice with customization.

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Changing one letter can be the simple activity that sparks understanding of Kindergarten students.

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Children must understand how speech sounds work to be ready for instruction in reading and writing. There are many activities that you can do with your students to help them increase their knowledge of speech sounds and their relationship to letters.

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Easy to implement games that incorporate Kindergarten grade level 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. 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.

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Implementing Phoneme Awareness Activities and Guidelines 

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Implementing Phoneme Awareness Activities and Guidelines 

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This article helps teachers understand the essential elements phonemic awareness activities must encompass.

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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.

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This game helps students match and rhyme corresponding to pictures.

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This printable rhyming set could be used in many ways and includes several pairs of matching rhyming picture cards.

To play this Rhyming Match Game, print out the rhyming mats and the picture cards. Cut out the picture cards and put them in a bowl or basket with the corresponding mat. There are three sets of Rhyming Match Games. Children will take a card from the bowl and find the matching rhyming word on the mat. For example, if they draw a carrot from the bowl, they will match the card to the parrot on the mat. Continue playing until all cards are matched.

The Answer Key sheet can also be used as an observational assessment recording sheet during small group lessons. When a child correctly matches a pair of rhyming cards, you can write their name or initials in the square (shown in photo below). I always abbreviate my students' names with the first 3 letters of their name:

Download the Rhyming Match Game

Each set has mats with 8 pictures and 8 matching cards. Download the sets below. These printables are FREE, just click the links to download.

More Resources

You might also like this set of What Doesn't Belong: Rhyming cards, available in my shop. Its a unique way to practice rhyming skills.

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This printable rhyming set could be used in many ways and includes several pairs of matching rhyming picture cards. To play this Rhyming Match Game, print out the rhyming mats and the picture cards. Cut out the picture cards and put them in a bowl or basket with the corresponding mat.

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This activity allows students the ability to work with legos to distinguish beginning sounds.

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Lego, Lego, Lego...If I had to estimate, I think we probably have over 30,000 bricks. My two boys (and husband) are a bit obsessed. In fact, as I write this post, they are all gathered around the Lego table (our former dining room table) building creations. I too have had to get creative and come up with some literacy activities to meet the Lego demand. Today I have our Beginning Sounds Lego Game Jar!

BEGINNING SOUNDS LEGO GAME JAR

Full Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Purpose of the Lego Game

Identifying initial sounds in words is an important piece of the phonological awareness tool box. Strong readers also have a strong phonological awareness. If we say the word, "Lego" and ask the child to identify the initial or beginning sound, we want the child to identify /l/.

This Lego Game Jar encourages children to identify objects in the jar and then isolate the beginning sound.

Lego Activity Set-Up
Materials needed: a medium-sized plastic container with a large opening (we used an orange juice bottle), various Lego bricks of one color, and miscellaneous Lego pieces (dog, Lego man, fence, window, door, etc.)
Ok, this is super easy. Fill the container will all the Lego pieces and put the cap on top. Bam, your done.

Playing the Beginning Sound Lego Game

Let the kids, shake and explore.
Variation #1
When an object is found amongst the colored Lego, identify the object by name. Then, isolate and name the beginning sound. For example, it the child finds a door, he would say, "door /d/."
Variation #2
Tell the child a beginning sound. The child then turns and turns the Lego container until he or she spots the item that begins with the designated sound.

Shake and repeat.

Here are some more literacy ideas to use with Lego-loving kids.
Lego Beginning Sounds Activity The Three Billy Goats Gruff Lego Retelling Lego Literacy Ideas PIN FOR OTHERS TO FIND AND ENJOY

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Lego, Lego, Lego...If I had to estimate, I think we probably have over 30,000 bricks. My two boys (and husband) are a bit obsessed. In fact, as I write this post, they are all gathered around the Lego table (our former dining room table) building creations.