11 Activities to Improve Phonological Awareness

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!

What is Phonological Awareness?

 Hi Everyone!

Seeing as my blog is predominantly written about how to get the best from students using a synthetic phonics approach, I thought it would be most prudent to write a piece explaining the ins and outs of phonological awareness. 

What is it? 

Why should every teacher be equipped with this knowledge?

I will provide the answer to both of these questions in today's post. 

Perhaps we had better wind all the way back to the start and wrap our heads around the what of phonological awareness. 

Phonological awareness refers to your ability to understand and recognize the sound structure of the spoken language. Or put more simply, an awareness that speech is made up of different segments, which are represented by an alphabetic code. It includes a variety of skills including rhyme awareness and production, word awareness, detection of syllables and manipulation of onset and rime. 

Under the 'umbrella' of phonological awareness sits a crucial, distinctly separate skills which consists of sub-skills. This is called phonemic awareness - the ability to recognize and manipulate the smallest units of sound in spoken communication. Let me preface the following: phonemes refer to individual units of sound in speech (i.e., 'cat' is comprised of three phonemes: c-a-t). Phonemic awareness consists of four main sub-skills including phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation, phoneme deletion, and phoneme substitution. 

Here is a handy little graphic I made to help understand how the skills fit in with one-another

You can think of the ability to read as a rope - a single skill that is made of many tiny strands, all equally as important as each other to ensure strength and integrity of the rope. 

We can also consider phonological awareness as a set of steps. Each skill is more difficult than the last, and requires mastery of the previous skill to continue climbing and improving. Below is another handy-dandy little graphic I have made to show the typical progression of phonological awareness in young students. 

It is important to remember that phonological awareness and phonemic awareness are distinct in what they refer to, and the skills they include.

Why should every teacher be equipped with this knowledge?

It's quite simple really - this approach works. Statistically, around 1 in 10 students is coming to school with some form of dyslexia - diagnosed or not. Teaching a synthetic phonics curriculum ensures that every. single. child. will have their learning needs met in your classroom - there will be no one left behind. Aside from being structured and systematic in your approach, the synthetic phonics method of teaching is one that captures the needs of your advanced learners, your middle of the road learners, and your learners who reading does not come naturally to. 

Multiple scientific studies support synthetic phonics as a teaching method that captures all abilities. In 1999, Schneider & colleagues found that explicitly and systematically teaching phonics and phonological awareness skills actually reduced the prevalence of dyslexia among at-risk children. 

I have been told by many reading experts that if students are still behind in reading at Grade 2 level, their chances of catching up are slim to none. It is our job at lower elementary teachers to hit the nail square on the head and to be exceptional, skilled, and knowledgeable in our instruction of literacy. We can achieve this through high quality phonics instruction. 

Comment below if you have been inspired, or are going to try something new in your classroom tomorrow!

References

Schneider, W., Ennemoser, M., Roth, E., & Küspert, P. (1999). Kindergarten prevention of dyslexia: Does training in phonological awareness work for everybody?. Journal of learning disabilities, 32(5), 429-436.

Why Your Students Deserve Independent Reading Time

 Hello All!

I am writing today to advocate for protected, routine, silent independent reading time in classrooms. If you already do this - amazing work, you can read below all the fantastic benefits your students are reaping from these sessions!

If you are not yet on board with independent reading time - you're about to be!

I have more than once had to defend this time against the opinions of others as 'wasted' instructional time.

I could not agree less.

Every single day, my students come into the classroom and immediately settle down with a book of their choosing for 15 minutes. I'm a little old-school... I won't let them read on their iPads during this time. This is only a personal preference as I think nothing beats the feeling of a book in your hands, with fine motor benefits in holding and turning the pages of books. It also helps to foster responsibility and respect for classroom belongings. We also have a few times a week a DROP EVERYTHING AND READ  session (D.E.A.R) where students literally drop everything and choose whatever they want to read. I'm often met with a loud cheer when I tell them to drop everything and read!

Independent reading time has a host of benefits I am about to share with you:

1. It prepares them for the demands of high school and university by creating skillful, habitual readers

Being able to read for a sustained amount of time is an important skill the prepares students for high school, college and many other careers. Students who engage regularly in sustained silent reading have been shown in a multitude of research to boost overall reading achievement. 

2. It improves comprehension abilities

Independent reading provides students with an abundance of opportunities to extract meaning from texts without teacher support, which consequentially results in improvements in reading stamina. Giving students a chance to rehearse this skill with reading materials of their own choosing boosts motivation to engage in reading for extended periods of time. 

3. Independent reading boosts vocabulary

The more children read, the greater their vocabulary, which transfers to both their speech and writing. Students who read more express themselves with a wider variety of language than those who read less. It also offers students opportunities to use contextual clues to determine word meanings and definitions, or to investigate unknown vocabulary with tools such as dictionaries. 

4. Engagement is increased

When students are allowed to self-select tests that pertain directly to their interests, true engagement is achieved. Students who are interested in what they are reading, and are given empowerment and choice over their learning in the classroom will naturally enjoy the act of reading more. There is voluminous research spanning 40 years to support the conclusion that reading for simple enjoyment is a major aspect of successful reading development. 

5. It improves reading ability!

The more one reads, the better one reads! Independent reading has been shown to improve fluency, automaticity, comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, grammar and spelling, reading volume, concentration, and effort in reading. 

Many students will not have access to texts or facilities with texts outside of school hours so we owe it to our students to give them protected independent reading time. If we want students to develop a love of reading and learning we must foster that within the classroom. 

The key is providing a wide variety of materials that appeals to a wide range of tastes and abilities to develop skillful and critical readers. I have linked down below some scientific literature for reference and further reading if you are interested. 

Let me know in the comments below if you are going to try integrating silent sustained reading in your classroom!

References & Further Reading

Anderson, R. C., L. G. Fielding, and P. T. Wilson. 1988. Growth in reading and how children spend their time outside of school. Reading Research Quarterly 23: 285–304

Clark, M. M. 1984. Literacy at home and at school: Insights from a study of young fluent readers. In Awakening to literacy. Edited by H. Goelman, A. Oberg, and F. Smith. Exeter, N.H.: Heinemann Educational Pub

Krashen, S. D. 1989. We acquire vocabulary and spelling by reading: Additional evidence for the Input Hypothesis. Modern Language Journal 73: 440–64.

Taylor, B., P. Frye, and G. Maruyama. 1990. Time spent reading and reading growth. American Educational Research Journal 27: 442–51.

Watkins, M., and V. Edwards. 1992. Extracurricular reading and reading achievement: The rich stay rich and the poor don’t read. Reading Improvement. (Winter): 236–42.