When I switched from classroom teacher to reading intervention teacher, I was immediately immersed in all things phonemic awareness (PA). Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in a language. It is directly linked to decoding and in turn, the success of a reader (you can read more about that here if you want more scholarly work).
The thing is, it only takes about 5 minutes a day to successfully implement phonemic awareness practices. There are SEVERAL pieces to phonemic awareness that you can look up in your state’s standards (most are imbedded in kinder and first grade). I’m going to focus on identifying rhyming words and sound positions (beginning, middle, end). Stay tuned for a freebie below!
One easy to implement way to engage your students in a phonemic awareness is with What Word Doesn’t Belong?
You may have seen a math version of this before (wodb.ca). In this activity, students engage in a discussion of the sounds they hear in each word. So in this example, students may notice that bat and bug start with the /b/ sound (which means that hat doesn’t belong). Or they may say hat and bat rhyme so bug doesn’t belong.
One of the best part of an activity like this is that it can extend beyond its intent as a phonemic awareness activity. It can help build vocabulary for beginning readers. It can also extend conversations on other observations they may make. Students may say that the bat and bug have wings so the hat doesn’t belong. Or the hat and bug are purple so the bat doesn’t belong.
The beauty of an activity like this is the openness and flexibility it can have. Although the original intent is phonemic awareness, it can extend beyond that if you let it. This activity is AMAZING for getting students to reason and justify their answers.
What happens if my students don’t catch on?
Some students are quick to learn sounds, but others, especially multilingual learners, can struggle. The key here is to PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE. MODEL MODEL MODEL. Believe me, I’ve struggled my way through a phonemic awareness lesson, it can be painful. But be persistent and you’ll start seeing it work!
For the FULL 50 SLIDES, go here (available in Google Slides, PDF, & PPT versions)!
Try it with your class with these two slides:
Leave a Reply