Activities to support phonological awareness

Phonological awareness skills can be improved. Some children require extra time and support to develop these skills and catch up with their peers. Others may require direct intervention from a Speech and Language Therapist, or in combination with an Educational Psychologist. Phonological awareness activities can be used in the classroom or in conjunction with a Speech and Language Therapy Programme. Ensuring children have progressed through structured phonics teaching is essential to identify any gaps in their letter-sound knowledge.

Pre-school and Nursery activities

• Early sound discrimination games (e.g. sounds versus no sounds, locating sounds, matching sounds, sound identification)

• Sound properties (e.g. loud/quiet, long/short)

• Nursery rhymes (singing together and enjoyment of rhyme and alliteration)

Age 4-5

• Rhyme (signing rhymes, leaving pause for child to complete rhyming word, judging whether two words rhyme or not, matching two words that rhyme)

• Syllables ('robot' talking to blend syllables together, counting number of syllables in a word, sorting words by number of syllables)

Age 5

• initial sound awareness (pairs or snap game of same sound using sound picture cards, match picture to sound, identify or sort objects/pictures by first sound, generate words starting with a chosen sound)

Age 5;6

• final sound awareness (identify or sort objects/pictures by last sound, generate words ending with a chosen sound, match object to final sound card)

• medial sound awareness (identify or sort objects/pictures by middle sound, match object to middle sound card, change the middle sound in words to make a new word)

• syllable manipulation (identify a word when one syllable is taken away e.g. 'hairbrush without the hair is...')

• phoneme segmenting (find the letters that make up this word)

• phoneme blending (say a series of sounds and the child has to identify the word)

Age 6

• phoneme deletion (take away the initial sound and the child has to identify the word that is left, start with words that have sounds missing and the child has to identify the sound that is missing)

• phoneme addition (make new words by adding a sound at the start or end e.g. 'at' as 'cat', 'bat', 'pat' or 'car' as 'card' 'cart')

• phoneme manipulation (changing the initial or final sounds in words to make new or funny nonsense words)

• Spoonerisms (play games where you swap the initial sounds in two words e.g. 'fish and chips' as 'chish and fips' and revert swapped sounds back to the original to identify the words)

visual support for phonological awareness

It is important to check the child has adequate understanding of the concepts being discussed (e.g. loud/quiet, long/short, first, middle, last). Where necessary use visual prompts for the concepts (e.g. lion for loud, snake for long, train carriages that represent first, middle and last).

For sound awareness, check the child can identify each sound in isolation, using picture cards such as Jolly Phonics, Read, Write Inc, or school based phonics cue cards

For syllables, some children may find using the 'syllable counting board' helpful for counting the number of 'beats' or syllables in a word. This may be useful for children who find it difficult to listen and count at the same time.