Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate words (including phonemes-the smallest 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 lovely thing about phonological awareness is, it only takes about 5-10 minutes a day to be successfully implemented.

Phonological awareness is a MUST HAVE, especially for our little struggling readers, we need to go back to listening to sounds and develop that ability to hear and manipulate them orally.

Here is an almost exhaustive list of phonological awareness skills. All the activities are all done orally. That means no letter representation. That comes in for sure, but for now, listening ears only.

click the picture to download

This list is overwhelming I’m sure, but they are such quick tasks almost all of them can be done in the same phonological awareness session. But to start, I would focus on the first 3 for a week (with a few examples of each) and then start adding in the others.

I would recommend the systematic approach of Heggerty Phonemic Awareness if your school site can purchase the book.

Here are two of my favorite phonological awareness activities to try out:

Phoneme Tiles

This is my (and my students’) favorite phonemic awareness activity. You can also do so much with it. This is much easier to show you than to type it all out (so watch the clip here). Phoneme tiles are just red/yellow counters (maybe you already have these from your math curriculum) that we use to touch the sounds in a word. Using sound boxes, we push each tile into a box for each sound. Students segment how many sounds are in the word and identify different parts of the word. With the activity shown here, you can segment, blend, isolate, and manipulate sounds. Can you tell why it’s my favorite?

grab the sound boxes (download)
grab phoneme tiles (aff link)

What Word Doesn’t Belong?

It works the same as what doesn’t belong used in math a lot. 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.

This activity is amazing for getting students to reason and justify their answers.

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