The research is very clear regarding the relationship between phonological/ phonemic awareness skills and later reading achievement. Children need to have an appreciation of how sounds can be put together to create words. Incorporating phonemic awareness activities into our lessons is critically important and they really don’t need to take up a significant amount of time. Quick and easy activities such as the Doggie, Where’s My Bone? activity are perfect for use during your small group instruction. This particular activity teaches students to recognize the position of sounds within words. You simply say a word containing 3 sounds– such as “cat”– and then a sound within the word– such as /a/. The student places a bone on either the head, body or tail to indicate the position of the sound within the word. Just for fun, I use small rawhide bone which I purchased at our local Walmart. Paper bones are also included in this file.
These Doggone fun phonological awareness activities are available for FREE in my online Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Also contained within the download is the Sound Switch activity. For this activity students are provided with two words (ball-bell). They are to put the bone on portion of the dog which has the sound that is different. This is a pretty difficult task for young, developing readers so you’d want to make sure they are solid with identifying sound position within single words first.
I have quite a few free resources and handouts on the topic of phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Be sure to click on the “Literacy” link under the header and then click on the links below. Hope you enjoy this freebie.
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