Teaching Phonemic Awareness to Children

Activities to Build a Strong Foundation for Learning to Read

Sep 24, 2009

Phonemic awareness is the foundation of reading and is a strong predictor of reading success in children.

If a child is having trouble with phonics (sound/letter relationships), it is likely that a lack of phonemic awareness is the culprit. In order for children to learn to read, it is important for them to develop an awareness of phonemes, or sounds. To learn that words are made up of individual phonemes and that these sounds can be manipulated to make other words does not require drills or memorization. Rather, a child can develop phonemic awareness through listening, playing games and participating in activities.

Listening to Stories and Songs

Listening to rhyming books like Deborah Guarino's Is Your Mama a Llama? [Scholastic, 1989], Daniel Kirk's Trash Trucks [Putnam, 1996], or any of Dr. Seuss's books will help a child begin to see how words can be manipulated to create rhymes.

Singing rhyming children's songs and hearing nursery rhymes are other sources of sounds being changed to create new words. After learning songs like Hush Little Baby, children can even change some of the words to make up their own rhyming verses.

Sounding Out Words

Children enjoy playing detective. This activity enables them to solve mysteries as they develop phonemic awareness. The adult begins by picking up an object like a book and saying the initial sound B. The child's challenge is to find at least two other items that begin with the same phoneme. After working with initial sounds, the child will soon be ready to find items with the same ending sounds and even the same middle sounds.

After adults share alliterative phrases, such as tongue twisters, children can make up their own silly alliteration by beginning with their own names, like Mia met many marvelous monkeys.

Another sound activity is a variation of the game, I Spy. In this activity, the child selects an object that begins with a particular phoneme. For example, I spy with my little eye, something that starts like Daddy. Since it might be difficult to figure out the object, the child may need to add additional clues like color and shape.

As children learn the skills, they should move to less concrete activities. After practicing with real objects, they can draw their own pictures of words that begin or end with particular sounds.

Blending Phonemes

Young children find it easier to blend than to segment sounds so adults can begin by teaching them a secret code game. Starting with the child's own name, the adult stretches the word. At this point, it doesn't matter exactly where the name is broken apart, since the focus is just understanding that sounds blend to make words. After hearing uh-li-vee-uh, the child responds by blending the sounds to say her name. Afterwards, the parent continues to break words apart, and the child guesses the words by blending the phonemes.

Children also enjoy playing memory games. After turning picture cards upside down, the child can turn two cards over, trying to match beginning sounds. As the child progresses in this skill, they can even try to get matches that end with the same sounds.

Making New Words

In order to help children learn to manipulate sounds, parents can use oral word activities. First, children should make new words by taking away sounds. For example, removing f from fear to get ear. They can also try to guess names with missing initial sounds, like addy for Daddy.

Next, they can add sounds to make new words, like adding ox to f to get fox. As children become proficient at adding sounds, they can work with harder words, like adding the sound c to the beginning of mile to get smile.

An even more challenging activity is changing vowels sounds to make new words that answer riddles like these:

Stretching Phonemes

As children develop phonemic awareness, they can begin to stretch words apart. In this activity, the child beats out the phonemes of a word, using a drum or empty coffee can. Beginning with words like bow, which have two phonemes, the child beats the drum as the adult says each sound of the word b-o. Then, the child picks up picture cards of other words with two sounds, stretching the word and hitting the drum once for each sound. Allowing children to progress at their own pace, parents can eventually add pictures of words with more sounds.

Rhyming Activities

In the car or in the waiting room at the doctor's office are great places to play rhyming games with children. By working with rhyming riddles, children can manipulate sounds. Rhyming riddles with animals are easy to create:

Children can play the same game with color rhymes. For example, I love my new bed. It is _____ (red). After mastering these rhymes, a child can move to more difficult rhyming activities. In the following examples, they listen to the words and decide which doesn't rhyme:

To learn to read, children need to develop phonemic awareness. To do this, they should take part in engaging activities that allow them to progress at their own rates. While enjoying guessing games and rhymes, children can master the skills necessary to learn to read.

The copyright of the article Teaching Phonemic Awareness to Children in Homeschooling is owned by Jean Kamuf. Permission to republish Teaching Phonemic Awareness to Children in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.