Phonological Awareness Activities to do at Home

The goal of phonological awareness instruction is to help students understand spoken words, syllables and phonemes so that they can eventually learn how to read words (decode) and spell (Honig et al., 2018). The following are simple activities to help your child develop phonological awareness.

1. Read a poem. As you read, have your child notice the pair of rhyming words. The endings sound the same, but not all of them are spelled the same. Here is the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost:

"Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold,

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour."

Gold and hold rhyme, and both words end with the letters o-l-d. But what about flower and hour? They rhyme, but they have different endings. Explain that it is because English words is a mixture of languages from different countries. You and your child can come up with different words that have the same ending as flower and hour. The goal is to notice how some words can sound the same but have different spellings. Click here for a list of poems for middle and high school students.

2. When trying to spell long words, break it down into parts or syllables (Moats, n.d.). Start with compound words such as "rainbow". Have your child spell rain then bow then put them together. Multisyllabic words are hard, but doable. For example, to spell the word interesting, break it apart first: in-ter-es-ting. The sound /er/ can be tricky so you can simply tell your child that the /er/ in that word is spelled using the letters e and r. Spelling and reading in syllables is easier than tackling one long word.

3. Have students read a page or paragraph from a book of their own choosing. Model how to read with correct phrasing (pause when you see commas or periods), tone, and rate. Have the student practice reading that passage several times to increase fluency. Give a small reward every time they read faster or with less errors than their previous try.

4. Notice when your child uses a new or complex vocabulary word. Provide incentives. You can do a reward for one new word a week or two new words a month. To help improve your child's vocabulary, have regular conversations with them. Adults have more advanced word knowledge and we can speak using complex and compound sentences. Regular exposure to these words and sentences can help children build their vocabulary bank and improve their oral communication skills. (Lonigan & Shanahan, n.d.).

5. Play board games! Super Duper Publications is a popular website among speech & language pathologists to get games to use in the classroom.

Remember, "Older students have experienced reading failure from an early age so they must be convinced that a renewed investment of energy will be worthwhile" (Moats, n.d.). Therefore, it is important to show patience, grace, and incorporate fun and energy when working with our teenagers.