Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words are made up of sequences of speech sounds. The child’s level of phonemic awareness upon entering school is one of the strongest indicators of how well he/she will learn to read. Children must have an understanding that words are made up of separate speech sounds that can be broken apart and put together to form words. Without this understanding, learning the alphabet doesn’t make much sense. Although some children enter school with an appreciation of the sounds of language, many do not. The exciting part is that, as teachers, by assessing our students’ phonemic awareness skills early on, we can identify those who may be at risk for reading difficulties and provide intervention right away. Research also indicates that phonemic awareness skills can be developed through instuction and that by doing so, the child’s reading and writing development improves.
This little activity can help children understand and isolate sounds in words. Actually, there are really 2 different activities in this free download. For this activity, you’ll need the printable of the dog for each child in your group. The dog is divided into three parts: head, body and tail. You’ll also need a little bone. I found these mini-rawhide bones at our local department store (Meijer). For the first activity, you’ll say a 3-phoneme word (e.g. cat, met, fed…) and then a sound in the word. So, for example, “cat /k/”. If the sound is in the beginning of the word, the child places the bone on the dog’s head. If the sound is in the middle, the bone is placed on the body and if the sound is at the end, the bone is placed on the tail.
The Doggie, Where’s My Bone? and Sound Switch activity is available in my online Teachers Pay Teachers store.
For the second activity, you’ll show the student 2 pictures (e.g. mouse/house). Your student will have to decide if the “different” sound is at the beginning, middle or end of the word. Again, a bone is placed on either the head, body or tail.
If you like this activity, you may also like the activities contained in the Phonemic Awareness Intervention Kit for Teachers. This kit contains 15 hands-on activities for teaching isolating sounds, phoneme segmentation/blending, and phoneme manipulation. All the materials are provided in this sturdy Sterilite container and the printable activities are printed in color and on 90lb card stock.
Leave a Reply