Discover essential strategies for teaching phonological and phonemic awareness in early childhood education. This guide outlines the developmental stages and suggests practical teaching ideas and engaging activities to develop these important early literacy skills in preschool and kindergarten children.

With over 25 years of experience teaching young children to read and write, I’ve had the privilege of watching countless students reach and even exceed literacy curriculum benchmarks.

This success stems from three key practices:

1. Building a strong foundation for phonological and phonemic awareness.

2. Implementing explicit and targeted literacy lessons.

3. Incorporating play-based learning experiences that provide authentic opportunities to practice reading and writing skills.

Every school year, my literacy focus for the first term is on concepts of print, and phonological and phonemic awareness. Initially, I was concerned about dedicating so much time to these foundational skills, especially when other teachers were swiftly moving on to teaching alphabet letters and phonics.

However, year after year, the investment in developing strong phonological and phonemic awareness paid off. I repeatedly saw my students making excellent progress and, in most cases, surpassing benchmarks by the end of the year.

This guide is a culmination of everything I’ve learned over the years, supported by the latest research in the science of reading. It includes the most effective phonological awareness and phonemic awareness activities and strategies that have consistently worked in my classroom. I am thrilled to share this knowledge with you.

I wish I had a guide like this when I first started teaching reading and writing all those years ago.

Many teachers confuse the terms phonological awareness and phonemic awareness so let’s get super clear on these two literacy terms and eliminate any confusion right from the start.

Understanding the Basics: Phonological Awareness vs. Phonemic Awareness

Before diving into the specific strategies and activities, it’s essential to understand the foundational concepts of phonological and phonemic awareness. Although these terms are often used interchangeably, they refer to different aspects of early literacy development. Grasping the distinction between them will help you better support your students' literacy journey.

What is the Difference Between Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness?

Phonological awareness encompasses a broad range of skills related to the awareness and manipulation of sounds in language (the larger units like syllables, words and phrases).

Phonemic awareness specifically focuses on the ability to identify and manipulate individual phonemes (the smallest units of sound) within words.

The main difference lies in the size of the speech patterns we are teaching.

What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognise and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words. Put simply, phonological awareness is understanding that sentences are made up of words and spoken words are made up of individual sound parts.

Phonological awareness is a broad umbrella term that covers a range of skills related to recognising and manipulating the sound units of language, including: 

• Single and compound words

• Syllables

• Rhymes

• Onset and rime

• Individual phonemes (sounds) 

Some examples of phonological awareness tasks include:

• Breaking down sentences into individual words

• Identifying syllables in words

• Identifying words with the same beginning sound

• Recognising words that rhyme 

• Blending and segmenting onset and rimes

Phonological awareness is a precursor to building a solid understanding of graphophonic relationships, which involves printed language and alphabet letters.

How Does Phonological Awareness Develop?

For children to develop phonological awareness, they need to have some foundational skills in place:

• Basic listening skills and the ability to recognise basic environmental sounds.

• A vocabulary of several thousand words to draw from.

• The ability to imitate and produce basic sentences.

• The ability to use language to express needs, react to others, comment on experiences, and understand others' intentions. 

These are prerequisite skills.

It is important for children to have a basic mastery of the spoken language before progressing through the four levels of phonological awareness.

The four levels of phonological awareness are:

1. Word Awareness: where children can hear and identify the individual words within spoken language.

2. Syllable Awareness: consists of segmenting words into syllables and blending syllables together to form words.

3. Intra-Syllable Awareness: narrowing words down into the units we often refer to as onset and rime. This level includes blending onsets and rimes to form words and segmenting the onset from the rime in words. It includes adding, deleting, or changing the onset and rime in a sound cluster or word.

4. Phonemic Awareness: is the most advanced and final stage of phonological awareness. It has four major sub-skills: hearing, focusing on, and manipulating sounds. 

It is best practice to view the levels of phonological awareness as overlapping stages. They are not sequential so your kids don’t have to master any one skill before they can move on to the next.

Nevertheless, there is agreement that some aspects of phonological awareness appear to be more difficult than others.

Research from a study titled: A Developmental Continuum of Phonological Sensitivity Skills states that children should be taught that spoken language can be broken into parts to recognise similarities and differences in those parts and then to manipulate those parts before teaching children how to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words. 

The study found that children must grasp the lower-level phonological awareness skills before they can succeed in the higher-level phonemic awareness skills. 

It was also discovered that within each sound unit (e.g., word or syllable), children are generally able to recognise phonological information before they can manipulate it, and they can usually blend phonological information before they can segment it. Finally, the study suggests that children should manipulate initial sounds before final sounds.

Factors Influencing Phonological Development

Phonological awareness is especially important in the earliest stages of reading development in preschool, kindergarten, and first grade. 

Children will start school with diverse levels of phonological awareness and there are several factors that can influence their development:

• A Language-rich Environment: Regular exposure to a wide range of spoken and written language from an early age can significantly boost phonological awareness. This includes reading aloud, storytelling, and engaging in conversations.

• Direct Instruction and Practice: Explicit teaching in rhyming, syllable counting, and phoneme manipulation play a vital role in developing these skills so make sure to include plenty of phonological awareness activities in your school day. Explicit teaching of phonological awareness in the early years can eliminate future reading problems for many students. If you have students struggling with decoding, working on their phonological awareness will help them, especially if they have problems in blending or segmenting phonemes.

• Individual Differences: I don’t need to tell you how every child is unique. Factors like a child’s natural ability to distinguish and manipulate sounds, their overall language skills, and even their enthusiasm for learning can affect how quickly they develop phonological awareness.

• Socio-cultural Factors: The linguistic environment at home and in the community, including the languages spoken and the value placed on literacy, can also impact the development of these skills.

Understanding the development of phonological awareness and the factors influencing a child’s development can help us provide effective instruction.

Observe your children and provide tailored support if you want to build a strong foundation for their reading and writing skills.

Now let’s dive a little deeper into the stages of phonological awareness and explore some practical activities to help you teach it.

Sound Discrimination

Hearing non-speech sounds is pretty easy for most students starting preschool and kindergarten—that is if they are paying attention.

Paying attention? Now, that’s something we early childhood educators are constantly working on.

Sound discrimination activities are important for helping your students learn to pay attention and for developing phonological awareness skills.

What is Sound Discrimination?

Sound discrimination is the ability to recognise similarities and differences between sounds. It relates to both speech and non-speech sounds. 

The sounds could be nonspeech sounds like animal calls and musical instruments or speech sounds like words, syllables, and phonemes.

Sound discrimination is one of the essential skills that our kids need before they even start learning to read. It is super important because it helps kids break down words into their basic sound components. This ability improves their spelling and reading abilities.

Sound discrimination activities play a crucial role in any phonological awareness program. Activities designed to help students distinguish and isolate different sounds should be your first step in teaching phonological awareness. 

Examples of Sound Discrimination

Animal Sounds: Children can engage in activities where they listen to and distinguish between different animal sounds. For example, they might recognise a cow's moo versus a sheep's baa.

Musical Instruments: Sound discrimination can be fostered through exposure to musical instruments, like when children distinguish between the sound of piano keys being struck and the sound of a guitar string being plucked or recognise the beat of drums compared to the melody of a flute.

Rhyming Games: Playing with rhyme helps children distinguish the sound structure of words. Nursery rhymes, rhyming poems, and rhyming stories are loved by young children and are the perfect resource for exploring rhyme and rhythm.

Why Sound Discrimination is Important

In any early childhood classroom, one constant challenge is getting our students to pay attention. We are always working on teaching our kids to truly tune in and actively listen. Sound discrimination activities can help us. They sharpen phonological and phonemic awareness and help students develop their listening skills.

When your students participate in sound discrimination activities, they are learning not just about sounds but also the art of listening.

At the foundational level, students begin by recognising and distinguishing between environmental sounds. Some sounds to include would be

• animal noises

• sounds from musical instruments

• household sounds

• nature sounds

Being able to discriminate environmental sounds sharpens listening skills and heightens awareness of the sounds in your surroundings. 

Sound discrimination activities are important phonemic awareness activities. They teach students to listen and really pay attention. 

If you are interested in learning more about sound or auditory discrimination, you should check out this blog post: 9 Practical Sound Discrimination Activities - Fun and Easy

It contains nine practical auditory or sound discrimination games and activities to help you teach this skill to your kindergarten or preschool children.

Word Awareness

Word awareness is a key part of phonological awareness. It's about knowing that sentences are made up of individual words. Even though children hear and use words all the time, it doesn't automatically mean they understand what a word is or can tell where one word ends and another begins.

What is Word Awareness?

Word awareness is the most basic level of phonological sensitivity and involves recognising that a sentence or phrase is made up of individual words. When listening to the English language, children with strong word awareness can easily identify where one word ends and another begins. Word awareness also helps when they start reading and writing.

For Reading: Students need word awareness to decode words. They need to be able to break words into smaller chunks, like syllables and sounds, for effective decoding. Without word awareness, this task would be impossible.

For writing: Students need word awareness if they are to write coherent sentences. They need to be able to recognise words and appropriately space them.  Not that my students have got this yet. “Where are your finger spaces?” seems to be on repeat in my classroom 🤣 

When children have word awareness, they can isolate words within sentences, manipulate these words, and track the word sequences in sentences. These skills are essential for sentence segmentation and word manipulation. These skills also help students see that sentences are constructed from individual words.

Why is Word Awareness Important?

While word awareness is an important semantic language skill, it's worth noting that it is less directly predictive of reading success than other phonological skills. 

However, recognising words as separate units in spoken language is definitely a precursor to reading and writing. Word awareness contributes significantly to vocabulary development, comprehension, and overall language proficiency.

The 3 Stages of Word Awareness

Word awareness has three progressive stages.

1. Word Isolation and Identification: where students isolate single words in short phrases and compound words. 

2. Sentence Segmentation: where students recognise each word as its own unit and can count the words in a sentence. 

3. Sentence Production: In this higher-level stage, students create their own sentences with a specified number of words.

Teaching Word Awareness Effectively

As an experienced teacher, I have found that hands-on learning activities are the most effective way to teach word awareness to young children. 

Here are a couple of some fun and engaging activities that I have tested and found to be successful in my classroom:

Listening to Words in Sentences

To develop word awareness in your students, start by developing their listening skills. Encourage them to listen to sentences and try to identify the separate words. This can be done through simple exercises like repeating sentences and clapping for each word. 

I like to do this during a read-aloud. Every now and then, stop to focus on the words in a sentence from the story. Count the words together by getting your students to clap for each word they hear. Want to add a bit of movement and get the wiggles out? Instead of clapping, get your students up and ask them to jump for each word they hear. 

Squash the Words

I love using my Nursery Rhyme Playdough Mats to teach word awareness. Each mat features a familiar sentence from a popular nursery rhyme.  

You give each student some play dough to roll into small balls. The kids place the playdough balls on the designated circles beneath each word in the sentence on their mat.   As they say each word, they develop one-to-one correspondence and word awareness by squashing the corresponding playdough ball. 

This simple yet highly effective activity will help young children see and hear word boundaries. It reinforces one-to-one correspondence, builds fine motor skills, and promotes counting practice. Such a fun and engaging way to develop word and phonological awareness skills. 

These hands-on playdough mats are a fun way to teach the concept of a word. I have found that using popular and familiar Nursery Rhymes keeps my students engaged and on task. Familiar nursery rhymes take the pressure off their short-term memory, so they can focus their thinking on learning to segment the words in the sentences.

Want More Engaging Word Awareness Activities?

Discover all my engaging word recognition activities, teaching tips and instructional practices for this basic phonological awareness skill here in this blog post: 22 Word Awareness Activities to Develop Phonological Awareness

This blog post is a practical guide to developing word awareness through playful, hands-on strategies and is perfect for kindergarten, preschool, and first-grade teachers looking to teach the concept of a word.

Syllable Awareness

Understanding syllables is an important phonological awareness skill.

What is a Syllable?

A syllable is a unit of sound in speech. It is a part of a word typically made up of a vowel sound with or without surrounding consonants. For example, the word banana has three syllables: ba-na-na. 

There are six different types of syllables:

1. A closed syllable: It has a consonant after the vowel. The consonant at the end of the syllable closes off the vowel sound, making it a short vowel sound. In the English language, examples of closed syllables include cat, sit, and top. 

2. An open syllable: These types of syllables end in a vowel and do not have consonant sounds closing it off. A consonant sound does not follow the vowel sound, so it remains "open" and typically produces a long vowel sound. In English, examples of open syllables include no, be, and she. 

3. A vowel-consonant-e syllable: This is sometimes known as a silent-e syllable or magic-e syllable. This syllable type is typically found at the end of a word. The final “e” at the end of the syllable is silent and often changes the pronunciation of the preceding vowel, making it a long vowel sound. For example, in the word cake, the "e" at the end is silent, but it changes the pronunciation of the vowel "a" from a short /æ/ sound to a long /eɪ/ sound.

4. A vowel team syllable: Also known as a vowel digraph syllable, occurs when two vowels work together to produce a single long sound. These combinations of vowels are often referred to as vowel teams. A vowel team appears in the same syllable, and together they represent one sound. Examples of vowel teams include: "ai" in rain, "ea" in team, and "oa" in boat.

5. A consonant+l-e syllable: Also known as a final stable syllable, is a syllable pattern consisting of a consonant followed by the letter "l," and then the letter "e." In this syllable pattern, the "l" is preceded by a consonant and followed by a silent "e." Examples of words with consonant+l-e syllables include table, apple and bubble. In each of these examples, the "l-e" combination forms a syllable with the preceding consonant, resulting in the final stable syllable pattern.

6. An r-controlled syllable: This syllable type contains a vowel followed by the letter “r”. The “r” controls the vowel and affects how the vowel is pronounced. Some examples of r-controlled vowels include: “ar" as in car, "er" as in her, "ir" as in bird, "or" as in for and “ur" as in fur. 

What is a Syllable Awareness?

Syllable awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the beats (syllables) within words. It includes activities like counting, tapping, segmenting words into their syllables, as well as blending them to form words. 

Why is Syllable Awareness Important?

Syllable awareness is a foundational skill in learning to read. Recognising syllable boundaries, counting the number of syllables in words, and blending separate syllables to make words are all part of syllable awareness.

Understanding syllables supports a student’s ability to blend and segment sounds. These skills are essential decoding strategies for young readers and also help students learn to spell accurately. 

If students know how to identify syllables and break down words into syllables, they will be able to apply spelling rules and decoding strategies to the different segments of a word.

Words Can Be Monosyllabic or Multisyllabic

Monosyllabic words have one syllable. Some examples of one-syllable words are: cat, jump, and thought. CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant) are common single-syllable words.

Multisyllabic words or Multi-syllable words are longer words and have more than one syllable.

They can be:

• Multisyllabic: Disyllabic: have 2 syllables like sun/set, ba/by, pen/cil

• Multisyllabic: Trisyllabic: have 3 syllables like i/mag/ine, di/no/saur, cam/er/a

• Multisyllabic: with 4 or more syllables like cat/er/pill/ar, u/su/al/ly, i/ma/gin/a/tion

When introducing syllables, it is best practice to use disyllabic words first, then monosyllabic words, and finally, other multisyllabic words.

How Many Syllables is a handy website tool you might like to use. It's totally free! You type in any word, and it will show you how many syllables it has, how to break it down into syllables, and even highlight the primary and secondary ones to make pronunciation a breeze.

When teaching syllable awareness, start with compound words or disyllabic (2-syllable) words like baby or snowman. Then move on to monosyllabic and longer multisyllabic words.

I like to start with compound words, which combine two separate words to create a new word. Some examples of compound words are sunflower, playground and bookshelf. 

Compound words are a great place to start if your students struggle with syllable awareness.

This interactive compound words activity is perfect for developing basic phonological awareness skills. 

Students will gain confidence and fluency and feel successful when they practice segmenting and blending compound words using the real-life pictures in this resource. 

Use these compound word clip cards to teach phonological awareness. There are 2 sets of cards in this beginner-level hands-on activity. 

One set blends compound words, and another segments compound words. They are ideal for kindergarten or first and second-grade intervention.

Want Help Understanding Syllables and Teaching Syllable Awareness?

Clapping the syllables in words for your literacy warm-up gets a bit boring after a while. So before you have to face another dreaded eye-roll, check out this blog post: Activities for Teaching Syllables and Phonological Awareness

This comprehensive blog post will help you teach your students all about syllables. There are twelve engaging syllable awareness activities your students will love in this comprehensive blog post. Use them in your classroom and your students will master blending and segmenting syllables in no time!

Rhyme and Alliteration

These skills focus on recognising and producing rhyming words and identifying words with the same initial or final sounds.

Recognising and Producing Rhyming Words

The ability to recognise rhyme precedes the ability to produce rhyme. 

Recognising rhyming words and words that do not rhyme is a crucial part of this phonological skill. For example, children with rhyme awareness can identify the rhyming words from this group: cat, hat, tap.

Note: Looking at written words is not part of this skill. Written words will come later when you are teaching phonics. In phonological awareness lessons, use only spoken words or pictures.

Producing rhyming words requires students to think of words that rhyme with a given word. For example, given a group of rhyming words like mat, rat, and hat, children might be asked to come up with another rhyming word like pat. Some rhymes are more difficult than others, especially those with more complex syllable types or multiple syllables.

Understanding Syllables and Rime

As already discussed, every word can be broken down into syllables. Each syllable has at least a nucleus or vowel. Most syllables also have an onset (consonants before the vowel) and a coda (consonants after the vowel). The nucleus and coda together make up the rime of the syllable. This rime is the part that rhymes.

For example, the following words have multiple syllables in the rhyming part of the word:

• One Syllable Rhyme (with syllable breaks): week, sneak, streak

• Two Syllable Rhyme (with syllable breaks): nation, dalmatian, frustration 

• Three Syllable Rhyme (with syllable breaks): serious, mysterious 

Alliteration using Initial and Final Sounds

Students learning about initial and final sounds often have them sorting words by their beginning and ending sounds. 

It is not about the initial or final letter so when organising resources and preparing activities using initial and final sounds, I like to say the words aloud and listen to the spoken words. This ensures the words have the same phoneme and not just the same letter.

For example, phone and photo are not related to the /p/ sound. They are part of the /f/ sound group. And words like shark or shop are not part of the /s/ sound group. They would come up when you explore /sh/ words.

3 Activities for Recognising Rhyming Words

1. Read Aloud Rhyming Picture Books: When reading picture books, choose ones that feature rhyming words so you can discuss the rhymes and rhythms of the read-alouds.

   I’ve got an impressive collection of picture books to teach rhyming words. If you need to add to your collection, check out this blog post: 79 Rhyming Books for Kindergarten and Preschool

2. Play Rhyming Splat: This super fun game is perfect for small groups. You'll need some rhyming picture cards and 2 fly swats. The rhyming pictures are randomly placed on a table and the children sit around the table with the teacher. Two children take a fly swat each.

   The teacher says a word that rhymes with one of the pictures on the table, and the children with the fly swats race to SPLAT the matching rhyming picture. The child who splats the correct picture first keeps the fly swat for another turn. The other child passes their fly swat to the child next to them, and the game continues. 
   

   Want the pictures I use to play Rhyming Splat? Download them from my FREE Resource Library.

3. Use a Rhyming Basket: To make a rhyming basket, put a collection of small rhyming objects into a basket for the children to investigate. It makes a great addition to an investigation area or literacy centre.

You can read more about my rhyming basket HERE. In this blog post, you will also get a list of easy-to-find rhyming objects you can add to your class rhyming basket.

3 Activities for Producing Rhyming Words

1. Rhyming I Spy: This is similar to the classic game of I Spy but it has a rhyming twist. To play, the first child gives a rhyming word as the clue instead of the traditional first letter.

   For example, if the child chooses chair, they say, 'I spy with my little eye something rhyming with bear. The other children then take turns to guess the rhyming answer. Allow the children to invent rhyming nonsense words to make the game easier to play.

2. Rhyming Obstacle Course: Use outdoor play equipment like climbing frames, balance beams, stepping buckets, jumping hoops, etc. to create an obstacle course. Stick a rhyming word picture onto each piece of equipment. As the children make their way through the course, they must produce a word that rhymes with the picture on their piece of equipment. 

3. Innovate on Nursery Rhymes: Create innovations on familiar nursery rhymes by changing the rhyming words. For example, Humpty Dumpty sat at the beach could become Humpty Dumpty was eating a peach. Young children love innovations.

Want more activities to teach rhyming? You will love this blog post: 43 Rhyming Activities for Kindergarten

Yes, you read that right. This blog post has 43 rhyming games and hands-on activities for you. They are all tried and tested. These educational activities are guaranteed to develop rhyming skills and your students will have heaps of fun doing it!

There are a heap of resources to help you teach rhyming words in my store. 

Want more rhyming activities?

Rhyming is such a foundational skill in early literacy.

We have a whole term dedicated to learning about rhyming words and word families in Prep. That's why I have so many interactive rhyming games and activities in my store.

If you are looking for effective rhyming activities that will keep your students engaged and excited to learn, check out my Rhyming and Word Family Resources.

Give your students the tools they need to succeed!

We have discussed most of the levels of phonological awareness in depth but there’s one final level – Phonemic Awareness. It’s a big one!

Most kindergarten and Prep teachers spend the start of the school year on phonological awareness instruction and one critical skill taking up a good chunk of our literacy block is phonemic awareness!

Teaching phonemic awareness is certainly a priority in the early years of schooling.

In my teaching, the phonological awareness and phonemic awareness activities in this guide have proven to be not just educational, but also incredibly engaging for my students.

My kindergarten students love the interactive, playful activities in this guide. Not only are these literacy activities engaging but since implementing the ideas in this guide, I've seen remarkable progress in their understanding and use of language as well.

It's a reminder of how learning through play can be so effective.

So download this free guide and choose from all the examples of phonological awareness activities in this comprehensive selection of play-based ideas. 

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the final skill that falls under the broad umbrella of phonological awareness. 

Phonemic awareness strategies focus on identifying and manipulating the smallest unit of sound (phoneme) in a spoken word. 

Before children can grasp the alphabetic principle, they need to understand that the sounds (phonemes) associated with alphabet letters (graphemes) are the same sounds used in spoken language.

While it might seem basic, many students do not inherently understand that spoken language is made up of sequences of small sounds. These small sound units are called phonemes, and phonemic awareness involves recognising that words consist of distinct sounds and being able to manipulate these sounds.

Phonemic awareness includes activities such as blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, and deleting and substituting sounds in spoken words.

Let’s look at the word fishing as an example: 

• Phonological Awareness: The word can be broken down into syllables: fish and ing. 

• Intra-Syllables: Within these syllables, we can identify the intra-syllables as /f/ (onset) and -ishing (rime). This is still part of the phonological awareness umbrella.

• Phonemic Awareness: The individual phonemes in fishing are /f/i/sh/i/ng/. This is a phonemic awareness skill because we are working with phonemes.

It's important to remember phonemes represent sounds, which may not always align one-to-one with letters or the word's spelling. In fishing, there are 7 letters but only 5 phonemes.

Phonemic awareness, like phonological awareness, is about speech sounds, not written representation, which is covered by phonics. 

Phonics instruction involves teaching the relationships between letters and their corresponding sounds.

Phonemic awareness can be developed without prior knowledge of letters and phonics. 

Why is Phonemic Awareness Important?

I know phonemic awareness is extremely important because I have seen first-hand how it influenced my student’s abilities to learn the basic literacy skills we teach in kindergarten and grade one. All that time invested in building our phonological awareness and, more specifically, our phonemic awareness skills in these early years of schooling built the foundation for many pre-reading and pre-writing skills.

When I saw other kindergarten classes starting formal reading and writing lessons, I used to worry that I was wasting valuable teaching time. My fears were forgotten when I saw how quickly and easily my students picked up phonics, decoding, and phonetic spelling.

Phonemic awareness will help your students develop and learn:

Decoding Skills: Decoding is the ability to match sounds (phonemes) to letters (graphemes) and then blend these sounds to form words. Phonemic awareness provides the groundwork for decoding skills because it helps early readers to recognise and manipulate individual phonemes. 

Your students need phonemic awareness if you want them to be able to decode unfamiliar words and sound out words they encounter when reading. 

For example, blending the sounds /c/ /a/ /t/ into the word cat is an example of a phonemic awareness task. If students can blend the word, they can then read the word.

Decoding skills are also essential for building reading fluency and comprehension in your students. The whole purpose of learning to read is comprehension, and it all starts with phonemic awareness and decoding.

Spelling Proficiency: When students are aware of the individual sounds in words, they can transfer that knowledge to spelling. Phonemic awareness activities will help your students to understand the relationship between sounds and letters.

For example, segmenting the word cat into the sounds /c/ /a/ /t/ is an example of a phonemic awareness task. If students can segment the word, they can then spell the word.

Kids need to be able to map phonemes to corresponding letters or letter combinations if they are going to have any chance of accurately spelling words. Strong phonemic awareness supports spelling proficiency and reduces the old reliance on rote memorisation.

Vocabulary Development: Phonemic awareness can help develop children’s vocabulary. It can help students break down new words into phonemes so that they can more easily recognise and remember them. The ability to manipulate sounds in words helps expand a young child’s vocabulary and can promote word comprehension too.  

Reading Comprehension: Phonemic awareness contributes to reading comprehension because it helps to build reading fluency. By mastering phonemic awareness skills, your students will be able to competently identify and distinguish the sounds that make up words, and that leads them to efficient word decoding. This in turn, will build reading fluency so that they can comprehend and derive meaning from the text. 

Language Acquisition: Phonemic awareness is closely tied to language development. 

By engaging in activities that promote phonemic and word awareness, learners become more attuned to the sounds and nuances of spoken language. This heightened awareness enhances their overall language skills, including listening, speaking, and even understanding grammar.

Early Literacy Success: Phonemic awareness is considered a strong predictor of early literacy success. Research has consistently shown that children who possess solid phonemic awareness skills are more likely to become proficient readers and writers. 

By establishing a solid foundation in phonemic awareness, your students will be equipped to tackle the challenges of learning to read and write.

If explicit phonemic awareness instruction is not provided, many students will not grasp the concept that words are made up of individual sounds. Instead, they may think that words are whole units that need to be memorised visually. 

Although children naturally learn about language by listening to speech and words, they don’t naturally hear the individual sounds within words. When we speak, we don't make individual sounds. Instead, we blend the sounds together to make entire words. So, if we just jump straight into teaching letters and their sounds without any phonemic awareness instruction, our students may struggle to comprehend the logic behind phonics.

Phonemic awareness is like a gateway to unlocking the complexities of reading and writing for our little ones. Don’t worry that any phonemic awareness activity or lesson will be a waste of time. Know that it is, in fact, building the strong foundation your students need.

And it is all backed by research. Recent research in the Science of Reading supports teaching phonemic awareness to students learning to read and write.

How Does Phonemic Awareness Develop?

Students learning about initial and final sounds often has them sorting words by their beginning and ending sounds. 

It is not about the initial or final letter so when organising resources and preparing activities using initial and final sounds, I like to say the words aloud and listen to the spoken words. This ensures the words have the same phoneme and not just the same letter.

For example, phone and photo are not related to the /p/ sound. They are part of the /f/ sound group. And words like shark or shop are not part of the /s/ sound group. They would come up when you explore /sh/ words. 

Initially, students explore the concept that words consist of smaller units known as phonemes. They then develop the ability to recognise each phoneme's distinct identity, allowing them to distinguish and differentiate these individual sounds.

Key Factors in Phonemic Awareness Development

Articulation: It's easier for students to distinguish between different phonemes by feeling them in their mouths rather than just hearing them. Emphasise lip and tongue placement, mouth shape, and voiced vs. unvoiced sounds.

Lip and Tongue Placement: Explore how lips and tongue position affect sound production (e.g., /p/ vs. /b/ and /t/ vs. /d/).

Mouth Shape: Discuss mouth shapes influenced by lip and tongue placements (e.g., long /ee/ vs. short /oo/).

Voiced and Unvoiced Sounds: Teach the difference by focusing on vocal cord vibrations (e.g., voiced /v/ vs. unvoiced /f/).

Phonemic awareness includes four main sub-skills: isolating, blending, segmenting, and manipulating phonemes. While these sub-skills can overlap, research suggests some are more challenging to master than others so I like to follow this progression:

1. Recognise and Isolate Individual Phonemes: hearing the initial, medial and final sounds in words and identifying the position of a specific sound in a word.

2. Blend Phonemes into Words: combining individual sounds to form a word, like /c/ /a/ /t/ to make cat.

3. Segment Words into Phonemes: separating a word into its individual sounds, like cat pulled apart makes /c/ /a/ /t/.

4. Manipulate the Phonemes in Words: deleting or substituting phonemes to make new words. 

Phonemic awareness is a gradual developmental process. Using classroom observations and research from the Science of Reading, I've developed a phonemic awareness continuum to help guide instruction and activities tailored to my students' needs.

Now let’s explore these four sub-skills in detail.

Recognise and Isolate Individual Phonemes

When children can recognise and isolate individual phonemes, they can hear the initial, medial and final sounds in words. They can also identify the position of a specific sound in a word.

Discriminating Individual Phonemes

Phoneme discrimination involves hearing and isolating sounds at the beginning, middle, and end of a word, often referred to as initial, medial, and final sounds.

Examples:

• The word cup has /k/ as the first sound,/p/as the final sound, and/u/as the medial or vowel sound. 

• In the word shark – the first sound is /sh/, the final sound is /k/ and the middle sound is /ar/.

Teaching Tips:

• Work with single-syllable (monosyllabic) words in the beginning stages of phonemic awareness.

• I like to start with the initial sounds in words because it is easier for students to hear them.

• Final consonants are quite difficult to isolate. Unfortunately, most speakers do not enunciate the final sounds in words, so it is particularly difficult for children just learning about phonemes to hear them. Make sure to clearly articulate your words and pay particular attention to your final sounds.

Start with Onset-rime Segmentation

Segmenting larger chunks of words can help students who have difficulty isolating individual phonemes. Try getting students to segment words into onset (initial consonant sound) and rime (remaining phonological unit).

Examples:

• The word sand can be segmented into /s/ and /and/. You can make a new word – and when you delete the initial sound /s/. 

• For the word bump, concentrate on isolating the first sound so it becomes b-ump. You can begin manipulation exercises and make new words by substituting the initial/b/ sound with other sounds like /h/ or /th/. 

5 Activities to Teach Phoneme Isolation

1.Hand-held Mirrors: Give children hand-held mirrors to explore the articulation of phonemes. As you practice saying different sounds, discuss the position of their mouths, lip and tongue placement and airflow. 

2. Picture Sorts: These are great for targeted phoneme practice. Begin by collecting two sets of pictures, with each set representing a different phoneme. For example, if you want to focus on the initial /s/ and /t/ sounds, gather pictures of items like a snake, the sun, a sandwich, and a seal for the /s/ sound.

Then, prepare another set of pictures for the /t/ sound, including a turtle, tiger, table, and a tent.

Start by identifying and discussing each picture and ensure your students understand the connection between the pictures and the phonemes they represent. Then model how to sort the pictures.

Picture sorts can be done by initial or final sounds. Do picture sorts regularly, and soon, your students will be able to do them with a friend and eventually independently. 

Don’t have time to gather up a collection of pictures for sorting? Grab my already done-for-you set of initial sound picture sorts HERE.

Based on the Science of Reading, these phonetic picture sorts teach sound recognition and develop strong alphabet letter-sound correspondence. Designed for beginning and emergent readers, this hands-on phonemic awareness activity is a must-have for kindergarten and preschool teachers seeking to practice isolating phonemes and strengthening alphabet letter sounds.

3. I Spy: My students love this classic game and it’s perfect for learning about sounds in words. To play, one person secretly selects an object in the environment.  They provide a phonemic clue by saying "I spy with my little eye something that begins with the sound /s/."

Everyone takes turns guessing the secret object. As they listen and guess, children develop their ability to identify and differentiate phonemes in spoken words. I spy can also be used to learn about the final sounds in words.

For this version, the clue would be "I spy with my little eye something that ends with the sound /s/." You will quickly learn who understands phoneme isolation when you observe a game of I Spy.

4. Phoneme Scavenger Hunt: Hide picture cards representing two specific phonemes around your classroom or outdoor play area. If you have my Initial Sounds Picture Sorts, you can use the picture cards in this resource.

Divide the class into two teams and tell the students to only find and collect the picture cards beginning with their target phoneme. The team that finds the most cards within a set time wins. 

5. Phoneme Memory Game: Create a memory game with cards featuring pictures with the same initial sound. Again, use the cards in my Initial Sounds Picture Sorts. Just print 2 sets of cards representing any phoneme you are working on. Students take turns flipping over cards to find matching pairs.

Blend Phonemes into Words

Being able to blend sounds is an important skill that directly correlates to phonic decoding.

In blending lessons and activities teaching blending to your students, you will provide the phonemes and the students blend these phonemes to make a whole word.

If you want your students to master this skill, there are some prerequisites. Students must be able to hear and isolate sounds spoken aloud and have a clear understanding of the concepts of a word and how it is made up of individual sounds.

Examples:

• You would provide the sounds /s/ /u/ /n/ for students to blend into the word sun. 

• Or /b/ /r/ /e/ /d/ to make bread.

Remember we are working with speech sounds.

Teaching Tips:

• I like to incorporate a motor-memory movement routine whenever we are blending sounds. To do this, the kids clap their hands with each sound and then make a sweeping motion with their hands together to signify the blending technique.

• Ensure your kids correctly articulate their speech sounds. To help them, use visual aids like illustrated speech-sound cards with pictures of a mouth making each sound.

Research on phonological and phonemic awareness instruction suggests starting with a consonant-vowel (CV) pattern before a vowel-consonant (VC) pattern, and then moving to consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) patterns.

Here is a progressive set of steps to follow:

1. Start with Short Words with Two phonemes: Start with a CV blend like /m/ /ee/ and then introduce a VC blend like /ee/ /l/. 

2. Use Continuous Sounds. Sounds like /m/ /v/ and /s/ are continuous sounds. These are sounds that can be held for a beat or two without distorting the sound. Your students will find it easier to practice blending and segmenting words with these types of sounds.

   They can hold the sounds using a method called continuous blending or continuous phonation. Words like “mmmmeeee ... me” are perfect.

3. Introduce Stop Sounds. These are phonemes that cannot be held. Ensure your students articulate the sounds correctly. Keep a look out for the dreaded /uh/ or schwa sound often added to the ends of the /t/ and /b/ phonemes.

   Words with a stop sound at the end are easier for children to blend so avoid words with the stop sound at the beginning. Words like at, up, or add are examples of words with the stop sound at the beginning.

4. Introduce Three-Phoneme Words: When your students become more confident, you can introduce words with three phonemes. Try to blend 3-phoneme words like mum that have a continuous sound at the beginning. Avoid words like hop that have the stop sound at the beginning.

5 Activities to Teach Phoneme Blending

1. Elkonin Boxes and Manipulatives: These are great tactile learning tools. The manipulatives you use with these boxes should represent each sound in a word. For this reason, some teachers call them sound boxes. When you use manipulatives with Elkonin boxes, it gives students the opportunity to physically touch or move the tiles as they blend the sounds to form the word.

This comprehensive set has over 200 Elkonin boxes to print, learning prompts, and teacher assessment checklists for teaching blending and segmenting phonemes. 

Your students will find the real pictures representing words with 2, 3, 4 and 5 phonemes easy to recognise and relate to.

They are perfect for developing phonemic awareness skills at the word level. You can use them to teach skills like phoneme segmentation, segmenting words, and blending sounds. Informed by the Science of Reading research, this early literacy resource is perfect for word mapping too!

2. Simon Says: This classic game has a blending twist. The leader, known as Simon, gives children phonemes or individual sounds to blend into words instead of complete actions. 

For example, instead of saying "Simon says touch your toes," Simon would say /t/ /oe/ /s/. The children would need to blend the sounds correctly in order to identify and perform the action. 

3. The Mystery Bag: This is one of our favourite blending games. 

Put a few objects in a pillowcase so they can’t be seen. The children need to guess the secret object, but instead of describing what it is, you say the phonemes - sound by sound. 

When a child blends the sounds correctly, you can bring the object out of the bag and give it to that child to hold until the end of the game.

4. Phoneme Bingo: Bingo is always a class favourite so make some bingo cards with pictures of simple 3-phoneme words like hat, bike, and shop. 

Instead of calling out the words, you call out the individual phonemes that make up each word. The kids must blend the sounds to identify the corresponding picture on their bingo card.

Don’t have time to make the bingo cards? 

You can download my Phoneme Bingo Game already done for you HERE.

This phoneme bingo game has been designed to help you build phonemic awareness in your beginning readers. 

Help your students to differentiate between sounds, letters and words and use this fun phonemic awareness game to teach your early literacy students to blend and segment phonemes.

This game is easily differentiated to suit the developmental level of your students. Click the picture to see how.

5. Blending Sounds Scavenger Hunt: Hide objects and toys around the classroom. Try to hide items that can be segmented into 3 phonemes. These will be easier for your students to blend into words.

After you give your students the 3 segmented sounds as their clue, they must blend the sounds to make a word. This is the name of the object they need to search the room to find. 

More Blending Activities and Ideas 

Want more ideas to teach blending to your students?  You will like this blog post: Fun Phoneme Blending Activities to Build Phonemic Awareness

In this blog post, I share all the tried-and-tested activities my students love and have had great success with. 

Empower your young learners with strong phonemic awareness using this comprehensive guide to phoneme blending.

Segment Words into Phonemes

Segmenting is a skill that directly correlates to encoding or spelling. Unlike blending, which involves combining sounds to form words, segmenting is about breaking words into their individual phonemes or sounds.

Children with this skill know how to isolate the individual phonemes (sounds) that make up a spoken word and can separately pronounce each sound in order.

Examples:

• You would give the students a whole word like sun and they would be able to segment it into the sounds /s/ /u/ /n/.

• Or in the word shop, the students would be able to break the word up into the three phonemes - /sh /o/ /p/. 

Why is Phoneme Segmentation Difficult?

Phoneme segmentation can be a challenging skill for young learners. 

Phonemes are the smallest speech sounds. They don't hold meaning on their own like words do, and that can make them hard for children to grasp. 

When words are spoken quickly, distinguishing these individual sounds becomes even more difficult. I have found some of my children find it hard to recognise the distinct sounds in words, partly because phonemes can sound slightly different depending on who says them or the words they're in. 

This variability makes phoneme segmentation seem unnatural and tricky to learn. Word segmenting difficulties can significantly impact a child's literacy development. 

When children experience difficulties in word segmenting, it can directly affect their ability to write words phonetically and decode and comprehend texts. Having difficulties in this key skill may even lead to slower progress in acquiring english language arts skills and understanding how to read and write.

However, with the right activities and consistent practice, you can provide tailored interventions and implement various strategies to address these challenges effectively.

I know your students can learn to master this important skill.

Teaching Tips:

• Just like I like to include a movement routine whenever we are blending, I also include a similar movement routine for segmenting. If you also want to do this, you’ve got two options.

1. This option reinforces the idea that segmenting and blending are related. The kids make a sweeping motion with their hands as they say the whole word and then chop their hands from left to right to signify the segmenting technique.

2. The second option is useful when children start writing. You can introduce the routine during your phonemic awareness lessons so it will be a natural progression when they start writing and spelling. The children represent the word segments with their fingers. This allows children to attach a phoneme to the visual of a finger. I like this method because students can easily see how many phonemes are in the word. 

• Correct articulation of speech sounds is vital. Visual aids like illustrated speech-sound cards depicting mouth formations for each sound can be invaluable in ensuring speech accuracy. 

• Consolidate the Term to ensure your students understand what you mean by word segmenting.

• Use visual tools like Elkonin boxes to help students visualise and segment sounds within words.

• Follow the gradual progression of skills. Scaffold learning by gradually increasing the complexity of word segmenting tasks as students progress.

If you are at your wits end trying to teach word segmenting to your students and looking for effective strategies to help your kids improve their word segmenting skills, I've got you covered! 

I have tried and tested various segmentation activities and strategies with my kindergarten students until I found the best ways to teach this important skill. In this blog post: 11 Teaching Tips to Overcome Word Segmenting Difficulties in Kids, I share my eleven practical and proven teaching tips. 

The Progression for Teaching Segmenting

Segmenting is more difficult than blending. 

Following these progressive steps will help:

1. Start with Short Words with Two Phonemes: Choose words beginning with a CV word like bee before introducing a VC word blend like eel. 

2. Begin with Stop Sounds: Words with stop sounds like /c/ /d/ /g/ /b/ /p/ /t/ or /k/ are easier to segment than words with continuous sounds like /m/, /v/, and /s/. 

3. Introduce Continuous Sounds Gradually: Ensure students articulate these sounds accurately. Watch children are not using the schwa sound (/uh/) to the ends of /t/ and /b/ phonemes. 

4. Progress to words with three and four phonemes: Explore words like dot and clock, where a stop sound appears at the beginning. For students having difficulty, avoid words with continuous sounds at the beginning, such as sad or shadow.

Teaching word segmenting can be tricky, especially for kids who are just starting to grasp phonemic awareness. Effective strategies and the right instruction play a significant role in helping children overcome word segmenting difficulties. 

So, if you have students struggling with word segmentation, don’t forget to check out this blog post: 11 Teaching Tips to Overcome Word Segmenting Difficulties in Kids. 

Some children may struggle to segment words, even after learning all the 44 speech sounds so I’ve put together all my practical teaching tips in this blog post. 

5 Activities to Teach Phoneme Segmenting

1.Stretch the Word: You can talk about segmenting a word into phonemes as stretching the word. Visual and tactile support for this concept is saying the word with hands together, palms inward, and moving them out from each other as each sound in the word is said.

Putting an elastic band around your student’s hands allows the stretch to be felt more easily. I also love using a slinky to demonstrate how to stretch out a word.

2. Robot Talking: This is a popular way to play with segmenting because when you segment a word, it sounds chunky and a bit robotic. Your students will not only love practising segmenting when they use a robot voice, but this chunky style of speaking naturally invites word segmenting.

You might like to use a robot puppet or toy to help younger children remember to talk like a robot. 

3. Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes: This fun movement activity works best with 2 to 4 phoneme words. The students can do this activity sitting or standing. Give the kids a word and have them touch their heads, shoulders, knees, and/or toes as they say each of the sounds in the word.

For example, the word green would be /g/ (head), /r/ (shoulders), /ee/ (knees) and /n/ (toes).

4.Count and Sort the Sounds: You will need a set of segmenting pictures representing objects with different numbers of phonemes. Show one of the pictures to the students and ask them to segment the word and count the sounds they hear.

Then, give the students a few picture cards to sort based on the number of sounds they contain. This activity not only strengthens segmentation skills but also reinforces counting and sorting.

At the start of the year, my students need lots of sorting and counting practice, so this phonemic awareness activity is always a winner!

Because this activity covers so many kindergarten learning objectives, such as sorting, counting, and phonemic awareness, we always do this one at the beginning of the school year. 

Here’s the segmented picture cards I use for our phoneme picture sort activity.

If you are teaching your students how to count phonemes in a word, you’ll love this resource. It has 72 phoneme counting picture cards young children will instantly recognise and relate to. 

These carefully curated cards are print-and-go. I’ve done the searching for you and hand-picked, high-quality photo images representing words with 2, 3, 4, and 5 phonemes. 

I've also included a heap of BONUS resources in this resource so you can use these cards for a variety of different learning activities.

5. Piggy Bank Segmenting: For this activity, you will need counters, bingo chips, toy gold coins, and a small piggy bank. You will give the child a word to segment, and they will place a counter or coin in the piggybank slot for each sound said.

Give the students a word with 2-5 phonemes and have them pick up a coin while they say each sound. Then, the sounds can be said again as each coin is placed in the piggy bank. 

A Bonus Segmenting Activity

I love using PowerPoint presentations as literacy warm-ups so I thought you might too. I use this engaging Segmenting Warm-up PowerPoint presentation with pictures and segmenting dots to practice our phonemic segmentation skills.

This PowerPoint lesson is an engaging and effective way to teach word segmenting.

With 90 differentiated slides featuring real-life photographs, you'll have plenty of word options to choose from. 

The included pictures represent words with 2, 3, 4, and 5 phonemes. This resource makes teaching phoneme segmentation fun and easy. 

A Word on Elkonin Boxes

Elkonin Boxes are a visual aid many teachers use to support students' learning to blend and segment words.

They are a grid of boxes with each box representing a sound in a word. Start with just two boxes and add more as students work with longer words. 

Here’s how to use them for blending:

1. First, say a word that you want your students to segment. For example: cat.

2. The student repeats the word and then places a manipulative (a toy or a counter) into the first box as they say the first /k/ sound in the word. 

3. Then they would say /a/ while placing a manipulative in the next box.

4. Finally, they would place a manipulative in the third box as they make the /t/ sound.

Here’s how to use them for segmenting:

1. First, say a word that you want your students to segment. For example: cat.

2. The student repeats the word and then places a manipulative (a toy or a counter) into the first box as they say the first /k/ sound in the word. 

3. Then they would say /a/ while placing a manipulative in the next box.

4. Finally, they would place a manipulative in the third box as they make the /t/ sound.

For each sound, a manipulative is placed in one box while the student makes that sound. You can move from manipulatives like counters or bingo chips to letter tiles and eventually have students write or read the corresponding letters in the boxes.

Don’t forget to grab my big set of over 200 Elkonin boxes to use in your literacy instruction.

There are heaps of other resources like learning prompts, worksheets, teacher assessment checklists and more in this resource.

I use these printables over and over in my classroom – year in, year out for phonemic awareness, phonics and word mapping activities. It’s an easy transition from phonemic awareness to phonics because my students are so familiar with the cards.

More Ideas and Activities to Teach Segmenting

In this blog post: 22 Phoneme Segmentation Activities for Phonemic Awareness, I share my favourites. Over the years, I’ve tried and tested many segmenting activities, but these are the ones I fall back on over and over. They are easy to implement AND they work! 

Manipulate the Phonemes in Words

Phoneme manipulation is an important aspect of phonemic awareness. Developing this critical skill helps children to break down and construct words and paves the way for successful decoding and encoding. 

What is Phoneme Manipulation?

Phoneme manipulation is changing the individual phonemes or speech sounds in a word to create a new word. The new word is sometimes a nonsense word or a made-up word.

This skill is one of the more challenging literacy learning objectives in kindergarten.

To prepare your students for phoneme manipulation, ensure they have practiced syllable manipulation first. The processes of adding, deleting, and substituting syllables will make the transition to phonemes easier.

3 Types of Phoneme Manipulation

1. Manipulating Initial Phonemes 

• Adding an ending sound to make a new word: Add /b/ to /-at/ and the word is? bat 

• Deleting an initial sound from a word: Say cup without the /k/ and what is left? up

• Substituting an initial sound:  The word is big. Change /b/ to /p/ and the word is? pig

2. Manipulating Final Phonemes: 

• Adding a final sound to make a new word: Add /d/ to the end of see and the new word is? seed

• Deleting a final sound from a word: Say cart without the /t/ and what is left? car

• Substituting a final sound:  The word is bug. Change /g/ to /s/and the word is? bus

3. Manipulating Middle Phonemes: Adding or deleting middle sounds to form new words is not something typically practised in kindergarten, but substituting the middle phonemes can be introduced. This is quite an advanced skill. 

I have found that most kindergarten children find this quite difficult as a phonemic awareness activity. It becomes easier once we have started phonics activities and the children have a good understanding of graphemes (letters).

Here are some examples of changing the middle sound:

• The word is pen. Change the /e/ to an /i/, and the word is? pin

• The word is shop. Change the /o/ to /i/, and the word is? ship

• The word is boat. Take away the /oa/ and replace it with an /u/. The new word is? but

• The word is boat. Change the /oa/ to /ee/, and the word is? beat

You might have many students ready to work on phoneme manipulation, but you will probably need to differentiate the types of words you use.

Most children master advanced techniques by the end of grade three.

Research suggests phoneme manipulation is a pre-requisite to blending and segmenting and a predictor of word-level reading proficiency. 

However, there is some evidence to suggest that deletion and manipulation of phonemes are skills that develop as a result of learning to read and so can be seen as mutually advantageous to reading skills rather than prerequisites. 

Some children find deletion and manipulation of sounds easier when they use manipulatives like letter tiles. This supports the research showing that phonemic awareness training is most effective when combined with phonics.

While young children need to understand sounds in words and develop their phonemic awareness skills, they don't have to fully grasp it before you start teaching about letters and phonics. 

Phonemic awareness continues to develop as children are exposed to language orally and in print. 

It’s OK to start adding graphemes (letter symbols) once children are able to recognise the beginning sounds of words. 

Phonological awareness skills involving phoneme manipulation and other literacy skills related to reading, writing, and spelling will all develop together. It’s a symbiotic relationship—they will all support each other's growth.

So - Should You Teach Phoneme Manipulation?

Yes. Phoneme manipulation is critical in developing students' phonemic awareness and essential for learning to read and spell. 

Just remember to keep the sessions engaging and support students patiently until the concept 'clicks'. 

I find working with small groups to be the most effective. A small group ensures I can monitor everyone carefully and also allows for individualised support should the need arise.

There's no doubt focusing on exercises that reinforce phoneme manipulation strengthens the foundation for proficient reading. Ongoing practice and gradual increases in difficulty will yield the best literacy outcomes for your students.

Phonemic awareness activities involving phoneme manipulation exercises, while oral in nature, are preparing students for the essential task of transferring these auditory discrimination skills to reading and spelling.

Remember as students develop their phonemic awareness, it's okay to start phonics lessons. This will give you an opportunity to link the specific phonemes the students are working with to their corresponding letters and spelling patterns. This balanced literacy approach reinforces the interplay between phonemic awareness and phonics.

In essence, phoneme manipulation should not be seen as an isolated skill. It is part of a much bigger proficiency. Your role is to guide your students with clear instruction and practice with a gradual increase in complexity.

5 Activities to Teach Phoneme Manipulation

1.Make a Silly Word: This activity is quick and easy phoneme addition activity. Just say a base word, and the students add any sound to make a new nonsense word. It can be tricky for them to think of sounds on the spot, so I usually suggest they refer to our sound wall to get ideas for sounds to add.

You can practise adding sounds to the beginning, middle, or end. Children have a lot of fun with nonsense words. 

2. Sound Step: In this phoneme addition movement game, children add an initial or final sound to a base word. Each time an initial sound is added, they take a step forward, and if a final sound is added, they take a step back.

This game is also an excellent way to practice phoneme segmentation and to build longer words progressively.

3. What's Missing?: This is a fun guessing game that can be played for both phoneme addition or deletion. The teacher says two words for comparison and asks the children to identify the missing phoneme. 

For example, "Listen to these two words: eat and meat. What sound is missing in eat that you can hear in meat?" Identifying the missing phoneme is the first skill children need to master before they can delete phonemes independently.

4. Sound Shaker: This is a fun way to practice phoneme deletion. Give each child a small container with objects or pictures representing different words. Have them shake the container, take out an object, and say the new word without the initial or final sound. 

The new word will more than likely be a nonsense word, but that just adds to the fun. 

5. Where Did the Sound Change?: One way to develop phoneme substitution skills is by teaching students to identify where the sound changes in two words. Say or show picture cards of two different words, like cat and cab. The students have to identify where the sounds in the words changed.

It can be time-consuming searching for suitable picture cards to use for this activity, so I have created a done-for-you set. My Phoneme Substitution Cards will save you heaps of prep time and you can use them year after year. 

These Phoneme Substitution Cards are for students learning to change the sound in words. Designed to teach children how to substitute initial, medial, and final sounds to create new words.

This comprehensive resource contains 90 phoneme substitution task cards:

• 30 Beginning Sound Cards

• 30 Medial (middle) Sound Cards

• 30 Ending Sound Cards

Phoneme Manipulation Teaching Tips:

Explicit Modelling: Provide clear and explicit modelling. Ensure you are pronouncing the individual sounds correctly and demonstrate how to manipulate them. Place an emphasis on the smooth transition between sounds. Using visual aids like hand gestures can go a long way to helping struggling children.

Use a Multi-Sensory Approach: Engage multiple senses during manipulation activities. Use visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements to help reinforce the process. For example, use manipulatives, sound cards, songs, and movement to make phoneme manipulation more interactive and memorable.

Focus on Sounds: Have students close their eyes and focus only on the sounds, using only their hearing senses.

Gradual Progression: Start with simple and familiar single sounds and gradually introduce more complex blends. Scaffold your students' learning by providing ample opportunities to practice and heaps of opportunities for repetition at each stage before even thinking about moving on to more challenging blends.

Chunking Strategies: Go right back to basics by manipulating word chunks or syllables. Teach your students to identify syllables or word parts and manipulate them first. For example, start with compound words like snowman where children can add snow to man, delete snow from the snowman and change man to ball to make snowball.

Then move on to syllables like mon and key for monkey and Tues and day for Tuesday. You’ll usually be working with nonsense words because there are not enough examples of proper words for these types of activities. My kids love nonsense words – the funny words we make keeps them engaged.

Use Visuals and Manipulatives: See if pictures or other visuals, like Elkonin boxes, help. I have also found hands-on manipulatives like little blocks, counters, or even small toys helpful.

Remember to provide ample opportunities for extra practice, reinforce positive efforts, and create a supportive learning environment where students feel comfortable taking risks and seeking help when needed. Patience, repetition, and targeted instruction are the keys to mastering any skill in kindergarten and grade one.

Phoneme manipulation is one of those phonemic awareness tasks we spend a lot of time teaching in kindergarten - but why?

Well, it is an important foundational literacy skill! It can be a bit tricky for some students, which is maybe why so much time is devoted to teaching it. 

In this blog post, I’ll show you why this skill is soooo important and share 21 phoneme manipulation activities to help you teach this important phonemic awareness skill here in this blog post: 21 Activities for Teaching Phoneme Manipulation

Phonemic awareness is such a vital skill our kindergarten students need to master. If you want your students to reach their reading benchmarks and have success learning to read and write, you really need to know the best strategies for teaching this foundational literacy skill.

More Phonemic Awareness Activities and Tips

Want More Activities and Tips to Develop Phonemic Awareness?

I have a blog post with twelve teaching strategies for phonemic awareness. If you want your students to reach their reading benchmarks and have success learning to read and write, you can never have enough ideas and you really need to know the best strategies for teaching this foundational literacy skill.

The phonemic awareness teaching strategies in this blog post are all backed by recent research like that found in the Science of Reading. This research shows that strong phonemic awareness skills lay the foundation for children to successfully learn how to read and write. 

So, if you are wondering what the most effective strategies are, head over to this blog post: 12 Effective Strategies for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Phonics vs Phonemic Awareness

Phonics involves understanding letter sounds and using that knowledge to decode and spell written words. It's all about connecting letters to sounds. 

On the other hand, phonological awareness and phonemic awareness focus on oral language and sounds within speech, involving recognising and manipulating sounds when speaking and listening.

Phonics and phonemic awareness are distinct but interconnected skills in literacy development. The critical relationship between phonological awareness and phonics happens when a child understands that words are made up of sounds. 

Graphemes or alphabet letters and the teaching of phonics make no sense to a child who does not understand that words are made up of sounds. Once phonological awareness is established however, children begin to understand the relationship between speech sounds and print.

While both phonics and phonological/phonemic awareness play crucial roles in reading, they are very separate skills. A child might very well excel in one but struggle in the other.

For example, a child who can identify letter sounds but has trouble blending them to form complete words has a phonological/phonemic awareness challenge. 

However, a child who can blend spoken sounds and has difficulty writing phonetically or representing sounds with alphabet letters might have a phonics issue.

The English alphabet has 26 letters, representing 44 distinct speech sounds (phonemes). This complexity is why we need to explicitly teach our children phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics. 

Insights from The Science of Reading Research

Educational research related to learning to read, often referred to as The Science of Reading, provides us with valuable insights into the significance of phonological and phonemic awareness. 

Numerous studies highlight how these skills are essential for early literacy development.

Phonological Awareness: A Strong Predictor of Success

Recent research suggests:

• The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awareness). (Lyon)

• The ability to hear and manipulate phonemes plays a causal role in the acquisition of beginning reading skills. (Smith, Simmons, & Kame'enui)

• There is considerable evidence that the primary difference between good and poor readers lies in the good reader's phonological processing ability. (Smith, Simmons, & Kame'enui)

• The effects of teaching phonological awareness and learning to read are mutually supportive. Reading and phonemic awareness are mutually reinforcing: Phonemic awareness is necessary for reading, and reading, in turn, improves phonemic awareness still further. (Shaywitz)

• Phonological awareness is teachable and promoted by attention to instructional variables. (Smith, Simmons, & Kame'enui)

• Early intervention in developing phonological and phonemic awareness significantly improves a child's reading abilities. (Tom Nicholson)

• Equity in Education: Teaching phonological and phonemic awareness is a pathway to ensuring equitable access to literacy. It empowers all students, regardless of their backgrounds, with the foundational skills needed for reading and writing. (Australian Curriculum)

It makes sense. Think about a young child learning to read. They come across the word bus. To decode this word and read it fluently, they must be able to sound out the individual phonemes: /b/, u/, and /s/. But how can they do that if they can't hear and manipulate these individual sounds in isolation?

As an experienced educator, I have seen firsthand how essential teaching phonological and phonemic awareness is for my students. Throughout my teaching experience, I have seen struggling readers become confident and proficient, thanks to targeted phonological and phonemic awareness instruction.

Steps for Teaching Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness

Considering the research and the role phonological awareness and phonemic awareness play in building the foundation of reading, it is clear we need explicit and systematic instruction.

Key findings: 

• The report of the National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read (NICHD, 2000) states that phonemic awareness can be taught and can be learned. 

• Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to decode, read and spell. It is most effective when it focuses on only one or two types of phonemic manipulation at a time. 

• Segmenting and blending are the most critical phonemic awareness skills but phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when children are eventually taught to manipulate phonemes by using alphabet letters in phonics lessons.

The report also supports the teaching of phonological awareness in the Prep or kindergarten classroom. Children need to be engaged in systematic, developmentally appropriate activities aimed at facilitating shallow levels of phonological awareness like rhyme and alliteration. 

Activities like segmenting and blending that aim to achieve deeper levels of awareness by the end of the Prep year are more appropriate. 

Therefore, those children who are not demonstrating phonological awareness by the middle of the year should be identified and targeted for explicit intervention.

The Basic Steps and Best Practices for Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Instruction 

1. Begin with Phonological Awareness: Start with compound words, syllables, and onset-rime for younger learners. Allow them to blend, segment, and manipulate parts of words before introducing phonemes.

2. Progress to Phonemes: Transfer the blending, segmenting and manipulating to the phoneme level. This level is crucial for learning to decode and read and for learning to write and spell.

3. Teach the Three Levels of Skills: Phonological and phonemic awareness skills can be divided into three levels: early (related to compound words, syllables, and onset-rime), basic (focused on blending and segmenting), and advanced (specifically manipulating individual phonemes). Many teachers focus on the basic level only. While basic skills like blending and segmenting are important for decoding and encoding, they alone are not enough to create proficient readers. Early and advanced phonemic awareness instruction is just as important.

4. Short and Focused Instruction: Phonemic awareness instruction doesn't need to be lengthy. Dr. Heggerty's short lessons provide effective practice and repetition for proficiency. Follow these lessons up with hands-on practice and you’ll have a complete program targeting all learners.

5. Daily Practice: Include all 8 phonological and phonemic awareness skills in daily lessons, progressing from compound words to the phoneme level. This repetition and practice will consolidate learning and ensures children develop that strong literacy foundation they need.

6. Follow the Gradual Release Model: When explicitly teaching specific skills, use the gradual release model. 

• I do = teacher demonstrates skill

• We do = students repeat with the teacher

• You do = student completes example independently.

By following these steps, you will provide intentional and effective instruction in phonological and phonemic awareness.

How Do You Assess Phonological and Phonemic Awareness?

Assessing phonemic awareness, especially in a play-based setting, can be done effectively and efficiently. 

Instead of formal one-on-one assessments that can be time-consuming, you can integrate assessments into your daily activities:

• Listen and Observe: Pay close attention to your students' responses during instruction. If you have short whole-class carpet lessons, you can work your way through groups of students. When they are sitting on the carpet, have a few children from the whole class to focus on each day. If you follow the Walker learning approach to teaching like I do, you will already have designated focus children each day. You’ll be able to assess your entire class over the course of a couple of weeks.

• Group Rotations: During literacy rotations, you can really hone in on specific children and observe their phonemic awareness skills.

• Learning Invitations: Create learning invitations focusing on phonemic and phonological awareness in your investigation areas. These hands-on, interactive activities provide opportunities to observe children's skills while they play and learn. It's a natural and easy way to assess their developing phonemic awareness.

By incorporating assessments into your daily routines and play-based activities, you can gain valuable insights into your students' phonemic awareness development without the need for time-consuming, one-on-one assessments. 

In Conclusion

Now you know all about phonological awareness and phonemic awareness and just how important these skills are in early childhood education. The knowledge you've gained from this guide can shape the way you approach literacy instruction in your classroom.

If your literacy focus for the first term is phonemic awareness, don’t worry like I did. You will see colleagues pushing ahead to teach the alphabet letters and phonics, but your students won’t fall behind.

Spending time explicitly teaching these foundational skills will pay off. Learning to read and write should not be a race! 

Rest assured, your focus on phonemic awareness is a strategic and educated strategy based on sound educational research. Build this foundation, and I know your students will develop strong reading and writing abilities. 

Enhance Your Teaching with Hands-On Resources

Using hands-on and engaging resources are a great way to ensure your phonological and phonemic awareness activities are effective and enjoyable. Visit my store to find a variety of literacy resources designed to support your teaching. These resources are created to help you save time and provide your students with interactive and fun learning experiences that work.

So take the next step and use these engaging resources in your literacy instruction. You'll enhance your students' learning journey and ensure they develop strong phonological awareness and phonemic awareness skills.

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