Phoneme Awareness Activities
Lesson Plan for Teaching Individual Sounds in Words
Teaching children the sounds of language (phoneme instruction) is more effective in different teaching situations and for learners with different needs than teaching letter/sound relationships without an early emphasis on teaching spoken sounds, according to a report by the National Reading Panel (NRP.) The emphasis on teaching phonemes is also reported to be effective across grade levels.
Phoneme Instruction
Teaching the sounds that combine to make words should include the following six tasks, according the NRP:
- Recognizing phonemes in isolation, e.g., identifying the beginning sound in hot.
- Identifying the sound that is the same in a group of words, e.g., bug, bed, bite.
- Recognizing the sound that is different in several words, e.g., bike, bite, and kite.
- Listening to separate sounds and combining them to make words, e.g., /p/ /a/ /th/ (path)
- Breaking a word into its separate sounds, e.g., the three sounds of fix (/f/ /i/ /x/.
- Recognizing a word that remains when one of its phonemes is removed, e.g., the word glove would be love without the /g/.
Phonemes in Isolation
This lesson will focus on identifying phonemes in isolation. Pick up a pencil. Say /p/ pencil. Ask students to repeat the word. Point to a table. Say /t/ table. Continue showing objects and having students repeat the words, saying the sounds in isolation and stretching the sounds (/rrr/), /hhh/.)
Say the words below. Ask children to say the first sound they hear in each word and stretch it. Use these words or some of the teacher's own.
- hot /hhh/
- man /mmm/
- lake /lll/
- red /rrr/
- wash /www/
Play a game with sounds in isolation. Say words, emphasizing isolated vowel and consonant sounds and ask students to touch their nose if the hear the /h/ sound. Clap their hands if they hear the /a/ sound.
Matching Sound Units
Collect magazines with pictures. Choose several different consonant and vowel sounds. Cut out an object such as a house and paste it to a large piece of newsprint. Ask children to say the beginning sound of house. Ask students to find other pictures that begin with the same sound. Do the same cut and paste activity with other consonant and vowel sounds. Check to see that pictures are placed in the correct groups. Display the newsprint work around the classroom. Have children review the sounds by pointing to the pictures, naming them, and stretching the sounds (/rrrr/, /hhhh/).
Phoneme Extension
Paste pictures on sets of index cards. Make sure that each set has at least two cards that have the same vowel or consonant sound. Include several sound pairs in each set. Place each set of cards in a bag that closes. Have children work together in groups to sort the cards into pairs of words that have the same sound at the beginning, middle, or end. Randall Klein, Early Reading Specialist, offers many more ideas and games for teaching sounds in isolation based on his article, “Phonemic Awareness, the Accelerated Learning Way."
Sounds in Spoken Words
Young children who have many opportunities to listen for and recognize sounds in words early will find it much easier to discover the relationships between sounds and letters later. Learning to recognize sounds in isolation, e.g., as in the sound that is heard in both dust and deck is one of the first steps to learning to read well. Teachers should assess individual progress in recognizing sounds by observing students and having children complete paper and pencil activities in which they match pictures with similar sounds, and providing extra help when a child is not showing adequate progress.
Listening for Isolated Sounds
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