Hello Friends!
Today I am writing a post on how to improve phonological awareness skills in your class. This is the overarching skill that strongly predicts later success in reading and writing - think of teaching students to read and write like building a house. You must lay strong foundations for the house it be built on, or it will all fall apart, no matter how well built the house is. By focusing on and honing phonological awareness skills, you are ensuring that the house has a strong, solid foundation to begin.
The term 'phonological awareness' encapsulates a wide range of skills that allow students to listen for and manipulate the spoken segments of words as well as sentences. It also includes 'phonemic awareness' under its umbrella, which refers to the ability to manipulate individual sounds within words.
If you want to read more about phonological awareness and its importance - check out my more detailed blog post here.
Let's get to it! Here are my top 10 activities for building phonological awareness in young students:
1. Syllable Names
This activity is so easy and engaging and requires absolutely no prep. In this activity, get students to clap the syllables in their names. If students are struggling with how to identify syllables, ask them to place their hand under their chin and say their name very slowly. Each time their chin touches their hand, it is one syllable.
Create a T-chart on the board and see whose name has the most syllables!
You can use many other interesting words to identify syllables too, like favorite zoo animals, food, etc.
2. Percussion Party
Read a rich text together - choose a popular book your students love. Take a sentence from the story and have students 'play' with body instruments to show the syllables or number of words. Students can pat their knees, clap their hands, or drum the floor to find out how many syllables there are in the words and whole sentence.
3. Rhyme Puzzles
Rhyming puzzles are a great way to get students to identify rhyme, an important skill that precedes the ability to generate rhyme. This activity will be best used with younger level students who are just starting to develop their ability to identify rhyme.
You can grab these fantastic rhyming puzzle cards on my TPT store:
4. Rhyming Stories
Reading stories with students that have rhymes in them is an amazing way of supporting phonological awareness. Unlike the rhyming puzzles, this activity will rely on some more advanced phonological awareness skills to generate the unknown rhyme. When reading books with rhymes, I will pause at the rhyming word and allow my students to fill in the gaps orally. This is a great way to provide immediate responsive feedback to their answers: 'hm, do c-at and d-og end in the same sounds?'
Below are some of my favorite books to use for an activity like this:
5. Onset and Rime Cards
Onset and rime cards are a great way for students to practice recognizing chunks in words, some of which are extremely common and seen across many words included in early texts. These onset and rime cards are fantastic for students to practice building word families, as well as listening to individual sounds in the words.
You can grab a set of onset and rime cards in my TPT store below
6. Initial Sound Bingo
Being able to identify the initial sound of a word is a crucial first step in segmenting and identifying individual phonemes in CVC and longer words. There are many fun ways to practice initial sounds. If you want a tonne of ideas check out my post on my top initial sound activity ideas here.
My favorite way to practice initial sounds on a whole class level would definitely be initial sound bingo. It really brings out the competitive spirit among my students and is a lot of fun.
Grab a copy of my Initial Sound Bingo on my TPT store here:
7. Build-A-Bear
I'm sure plenty of us grew up with the popular game 'hangman', while the premise of Build-A-Bear is almost exactly the same, I use a slightly more kid-friendly twist. The key difference in this game is that I don't spell words on the board by their individual letters, rather, use phonemes within the word to promote revision of learned sounds and decoding and spelling skills.
Here is an example of a completed game:
I use longer lines to indicate digraphs and trigraphs, and short lines to indicate single letter sounds. This game is fantastic as it rehearses how words and phonemes actually fit together, rather than learning words by wrote memory.
8. Car Park Sounds
Car Park Sounds is hands-down one of my all-time favorite activities. It targets so many different skills of phonemic awareness, including initial sounds, final sounds, deletion, insertion, segmenting, and blending.
This activity takes a little preparation beforehand - you will need to compile a list of around 15 words that have a focus phoneme in them (i.e., ch, t, ing). Arrange the words so that each time you read a word, only one or two of the sounds change. For example, when teaching the /oa/ digraph, I might use a list of words like boat, goat, gloat, bloat, etc.
Students use whiteboards for this activity and do not rub out and re-start each time you say a word, they will only identify the sound that changes, erase that and replace it with the new sound.
I cannot overstate how much I love this activity, how engaging it is, and what amazing opportunities it gives you for immediate and responsive feedback to students.
9. Boo Hooray!
Another fantastic versatile game to play with students who just love being able to boo and hooray you! This game can be played with literally any sound you are learning, as well as with rhymes. It is super simple - say words that do or don't have the target phoneme in them, students can yell 'BOOO!' when the word does not have the sound, and 'HOORAYYY!' when it does.
This activity can be used for rhymes too, just choose a target word like 'cat', and say words that do and don't rhyme with it.
10. Word Circles
This game is fantastic for quick line-up situations, or when you have just a few minutes to spare at the end of a lesson.
Knowing how to count and distinguish between words is an essential skill that I see an astounding number of students struggling to achieve. It is a deceptively difficult task if reading and writing is not a skill that comes naturally to your students.
Say a simple sentence to your students (i.e., the cat is fat). Only choose 4-6 words tops, they need to remember it. Move down the line/around the circle and each student says a word in the sentence each. Ask some students to identify how many words were in the sentence.
11. CVC Sounds
I love this activity, it is a zero prep and very powerful and effective way to reinforce skills of segmenting. It can also be played as a whole, small, or individual sized group activity - so versatile and easy!
Ask students to identify the initial, end, or medial sound in CVC words. I have a script that I tend to follow, as below:
Teacher: Initial sound in cat
Students: cat, c, c, cat
Teacher: End sound in cat
Students: cat, t, t, cat
Teacher: Middle sound in cat
Students: cat, a, a, cat
This is an amazing activity that can be changed to suit all skill levels - lower levels would stick to initial sounds, progressing to end sounds, and finally to medial sounds with more advanced students.
I hope you found something new to try with your students from this post! Let me know in the comments how it went for you!
