"the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words." (Reading Rockets, Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Activities for Your Kindergartener, 2023)

Developmentally appropriate classroom activities:

Matching pictures to letter sound patterns (graphemes). This activity can be modified by choosing age/ developmentally appropriate pictures, letter sounds and even blends.

Playing games that practice syllable awareness, initial and final sounds and individual sounds in words, like Scrabble!

Modify this activity for age appropriateness, for smaller or more challenging words try Scrabble and Scrabble Jr.!

At Home Activity:

Try this cool activity as an extension to phonemic awareness learning at home!

Phoneme Dominoes

Your student/child will match initial phonemes in words. This activity can help your learner, no matter what level they are on, to recognize and manipulate letter sounds within the words we use everyday. This is a skill needed to become a fluent reader.

Developmentally Appropriate Classroom Activities:

Tongue Ticklers: you’re focusing on specific sound and it is repeated over and over again. Try these:

1. For F: Friends find fireflies with a flashlight.

2. For S: Silly Suzy sings songs about someone special.

Classroom Sound Scavenger Hunt:

Choose a letter sound, then have your students find things around your classroom that start with the same sound. “Can you find something in our room that starts with the letter “p” pppppp sound? Picture, pencil, pen”

At Home Activity:

Syllable shopping

While at the grocery store, have your child tell you the syllables in different food or item names. Have them hold up a finger for each word part. Banana = Ba-na-na, three syllables/ three fingers. Icecream = Ice-cream, two syllables/two fingers.

These fun activities can be beneficial components of building phonological awareness skills in learners of all ages and stages of development. Modify be choosing more or less challenging words and or sounds and adding blends.

Reading SOS: Which Sounds Do I Teach First?

Developmentally Appropriate Classroom Activities:

Write Vocabulary Short Stories. Challenge your students to utilize all of their vocabulary words to create their own short story. Allow students to pair up (low with high student) to create a story for those who may need extra support.

Put your Students in the "Hot Seat".

"Divide your class into two teams. Choose one student from one team to go to the front of the room and sit in a chair facing the class with his/her back to the board. This person is “on the spot.” Place a word on the board so everyone can see it except the person in the chair. One at a time, team members give the person a clue about the mystery word. If the word is guessed before two minutes are up, the team gets a point and play turns to the other team."

At Home Activity:

Write an Acrostic

Write an acrostic poem for each vocabulary word, using the letters to determine the first word in each line. This can get really challenging when words are longer! You can modify this activity for child according to their developmental level by allowing them to draw pictures of something that starts with each letter in the word vs. writing another word.

Developmentally Appropriate Classroom Activities:

Paired or Buddy Reading

Reread passages in different voices

These activities can be used for students with and without exceptionalities at any grade level.

At Home Activity:

Select "just right" (books that are not too hard or too easy) books with your child. Let them read to you for at least 30 minutes each day!

How to coach your child to read fluently, a resource for parents to help elevate your childs reading fluency.

Developmentally Appropriate Classroom Activities:

Word Hunt

Encourage learners to become a detective and letting them hunt for individual words within a text. Say each word aloud one at a time, then ask the learners to mark it off or draw a circle around it. To make even more fun, break students into teams to compete for a prize!

True or False?

True or false activities can be assessments after reading a text, which can be done either verbally or written. Learners must identify the correct information within the text and tell whether each given statement is true or false, which requires them to reread the text carefully, which demonstrates comprehension.

At Home Activity:

Try game based learning. Websites such as prodigygame.com have fun games that help improve reading and comprehension skills for all learners, with and without exceptionalities.