Phonemic awareness is the understanding that there is a connection between individual sounds and spoken words. I find that having students use counters to identify sounds as they hear them works well to visualizing the phonemes. If counters are available, you can have students draw lines or tap their desks for each sound heard.

Students should also have practice with manipulating phonemes. I like to pick two activities to work on each day with the list of spelling words that we are working with for the week.

Addition/ Substitution: Say a word, have students repeat the word, then pick one phoneme to change and have the students repeat the new word. For example: T- Say bat, S- Bat, T- change /b/ to /k/, S- Cat

Onset and Rime segmentation: Create a list of words that the students can separate the onset and rime, and alternate between splitting the word up and having students blend it together or saying the word and having students separate the phonemes. For example: T- Blend the word together: /b/ - at, S- Bat. Another example is: T- Separate the beginning sound and the rest of the word: bat, S- /b/ - at.

Deletion: This is where students are given a full word and told to delete the initial or final phoneme and say the phonemes that are left. For example: T- say bat, S- bat, T- say bat again without the /b/, S- at.

I have found that a great way to teach phonics is with manipulatives or other hands on strategies. Here is a routine to teach a new sound: The first thing to start with on day one is a letter, sound, and picture correspondence. For example, if you are teaching the /a/ sound, then you can show a picture of an apple, the letter a, and review what our mouth looks like when we make the /a/ sound. On day two, the students can conduct a word find either in a passage or around the room. The students can identify words or objects with the /a/ sound. On day three, teachers can have students use word building cards to build words with the focus sound. Word building cards can be made out of index cards cut in 1/2 with a letter written on each card. Consonant digraphs can be put on one card. For the rest of the week, the students can build words using a whiteboard or students can underline words that have the focus sound within a passage or story.

A word find can be a fun way to engage students in practicing the focus sound. On a paper, type up words with or without the focus sound in different sizes or fonts and have students find and circle all the words with the focus sound. Make sure to have students read each word before circling (finding) it.