This is a lesson that gives focus to ending sounds when children speak. This lesson will help students who struggle with speaking and rhyming words. The end of the word carries the rhyme. By teaching students to fully enunciate their words you better prepare them for both social and academic interaction. Teaching these strategies is modeled in the video. The lesson is on the kinder-1st grade level. English language learners will also benefit because it will help students who are unfamiliar with some words and sounds. Speech to print tactics are utilized which will benefit native and non native english learners. This video can help the students from “somewhere elementary school” who struggle with rhyme. 

The video touches on what Phonological awareness is and the categories that are under it. The video also discusses the importance of reading rhyming books to students to teach the students to have an “ear” for rhyme. 

This is a great list of strategies to help struggling readers. One of the methods is to introduce individual letters. This is extremely beneficial for english language learners who are unfamiliar with the English alphabet. This would benefit some of the students in “Somewhere Elementary” who are English Language Learners, especially those whose native language used a different alphabet.  

The classroom is a great resource for teachers. This page has many different activities dealing with phonemic awareness. One of the activities, “How many Sounds” is something I have used in the classroom on multiple occasions. The goal is to teach students how words are made up of different sounds. The goal is to get students to find how many sounds a single word has. I typically have students get out whiteboards and write the number and reveal together what they believe to be the correct number of sounds. This activity will also help to prepare students to meet the common core standard. “CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.2.C, Isolate and pronounce initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in spoken single-syllable words.” 

This lesson is fantastic for those who are already struggling with time constraints because the total time is ten minutes per day. This lesson will help multiple types of learners as well. Kinesthetic and visual learning is utilized. Students are given the task of forming letters from play-dough. Students are also given pictures of items and are told to pair the pictures together to form compound words. 

Jack Hartmann is a fun, attention getting way to teach and reinforce skills taught in the classroom. These can be used as an activity when students are getting a little bored or ancy and need to get up and move. Jack Hartmann has many different videos and it is easy to find one that ties into the lesson. This video is about digraphs. It breaks down what a digraph is and shows how to pronounce multiple digraphs. 

This is a great article that describes how early phonemic awareness can predict reading success later on in a students academic career. This should serve as an important call to action to elementary age students. According to David A. Sousa, “Young readers who are exposed to direct instruction on the morphological aspects of language become more capable readers than those who are not.” These foundational years will have a crucial impact on their ability to read. The skills learned in grades k-3 will influence their performance in many areas of their life. 

This is a video that shows how teachers can assess their students for phonemic awareness. The methods used can be transferred into the classroom to measure your students' understanding. The student is asked to tell the beginning sounds of words the teacher says. The student is then given the task of finding words that rhyme with words they hear the teacher say. 

 Here is a great way to see if children are having difficulty understanding certain sounds. When a child says the wrong sound for a letter it is important to know if they are having difficulty with certain phonological processes or are just having trouble understanding the differences between letters.

Directed by Larry Walcoff, With Chrisann Andersen, Gloria Klopf, Produced by Larry Walcoff, In Building Blocks for Early Literacy: Phonemic Awareness/Phonics (Chicago, IL: Magna Systems, 2003), 26 minutes

This resource discusses Elkonin boxes to teach phonemic awareness. The boxes are for students to break down words into sounds to teach how words are created from different sounds. Substitution of sounds and letters to create new words is also taught among other strategies. 

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