Phonological Awareness

Suggestions for Parents

Phonological awareness is developed through a variety of activities that expose students to the sound structure of the language and teach them to manipulate it. The classroom teacher is the first possible provider of this type of instruction. Specific activities, like clapping the sounds in words and blending phonemes to say words, as well as less directed activities like songs and nursery rhymes are important in developing this auditory skill. Research has also shown that students learn phonological awareness in the context of activities that do involve letters and sometimes even spelling. Although phonological awareness is technically only about sounds, research demonstrates the utility of doing phonological awareness practice in the context of reading activities. Phonological awareness instruction may be provided by the Speech/Language Pathologist, Special Education Teacher or Reading Teacher in your school.Most children discover they can play with sounds and words.

They will often do sound play activities such as rhyming a name; “Silly Willy”, or hearing the same sound in two words; “Tommy’s tooth”.

Rhyming is a good place to start to teach your child the many skills involved in phonological awareness.

• Read Dr. Seuss books such as "Hop on Pop" -have child try to guess the rhyme as you pause in your reading
• Listen to songs such as Raffi's "Singable Songs" or practice jump rope rhymes
• Make up a rhyme and put it to a tune such as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"
• Ball toss where you start with a word to rhyme such as "cat" and the person who catches the ball has to give another word that rhymes, such as "bat"

Identifying beginning/ending sounds

• Make up alliteration phrases like "silly sally sang" and have child say what sound is being said at the beginning of each word
• Do the above with ending sounds, "pick thick stick" emphasizing the ending sound
• Have your child tell whether word pairs you say start or end with the same sound "pin-fin"

Segmenting sentences and word syllables

• Hop or clap once for each word in a sentence of up to 5 words
• Say a compound word and clap once for each syllable
• Cut up a picture with two, three or four syllables, one section or puzzle piece for each syllable. Have your child put them together saying each syllable as he pieces the picture together

Blending, syllables and sounds

• Say a word with a second of time between syllables such as pea-nut and the child says it faster so it blends together
• Say the sounds of a word such as d-o-ll and have your child say them together faster so "doll” is produced
• When child is good at this, have him make up his own words in syllables and sounds and you guess by
• blending them together

Deleting syllables and sounds

• Start with a compound word and then have child say it without a part. You would say "rain - bow" and have them say it again without "rain"
• As they get better with this, you can use a two syllable word such as "party' without "par" leaves "ty"
• Move on to deleting sounds in words such as “cat” without /k/ leaves “at”

Substitute sounds at the beginning and ends of words

• Use coins or blocks and say a sound for each block as you point to it; “b-a-t”; then push away the first block and put another in it’s place as you ask your child to say “m” instead of “b” and you get “mat”.
• Then make a new word with “cup”, take away the last block and put a new one in as you ask your child to say “t” and put it together for “cut”.

Keep in mind that none of these activities involve letters. It is all done with listening, using pictures or games. It helps your child learn that our language is make up of sounds and that sounds can go together to make up words we say. Speech sound awareness is a key to eventually reading and spelling with our alphabetic language.