A few years ago, my school district adopted Heggrety- a phonemic awareness drill style curriculum that helped students practice a variety of PA skills in just 10 minutes a day. The curriculum itself was (and still is) fantastic and was a much needed supplement to our curriculum, which was lacking some serious PA practice. At the time, I was in my 5th year of teaching first grade. My students were leaving as readers, so I didn’t really find additional PA practice necessary- I was convinced our curriculum was doing “just” fine but like most teachers, I am a rule follower, so I was going to follow the rules. Needless to say, I was surprised at what adding this 10 minute practice every day did for my classroom!
Why Phonemic Awareness?
Within the first week, it was apparent to me that my students were not as strong with phonemic awareness as I thought they were. I had gone from an overly confident teacher to thinking what in the world is missing from my literacy block? The drills were hard, even for kids that I thought were pretty solid in literacy. By Thanksgiving break that year, I could see a distinct difference in my students as readers. Adding phonemic awareness practice increased the rate at which they were learning and applying phonics skills to encoding and decoding. It was naturally scaffolding their learning, providing ways for them to connect and transfer skills, and allowing them to talk about phonics and words in new and deeper ways. I could suddenly see why decoding and sight word practice wasn’t enough, and knew that I needed to integrate regular phonemic awareness activities, practice, and drills into my literacy block.
Rhyming Practice Before Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the most complex skill under the phonological awareness umbrella. Before students can isolate, manipulate and segment sounds, they need to be able to hear rhymes, break words into syllables, and identify and manipulate on-set rime. I have a great, FREE resource in my TPT store that will helps support all of these skills.
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Like everything else about learning to read, understanding phonemic awareness can be, well…complicated. Phonemic Awareness is a sub skill that falls under the umbrella of Phonological Awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds that make up a word. It is made of a series of skills that span from whole word (rhyming & sentence segmenting) to individual sounds and phonemes, aka phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify, segment, and manipulate the individual sounds in a spoken word and is the most advanced of the skills that fall under the phonological awareness umbrella. These skills can include identifying and isolating the beginning, middle, or end sound in a word.
As a teacher, time is precious and there never seems to be enough time in the day to add more. However, there are so many quick, easy, one minute phonemic awareness activities that will help kids practice these skills. I love picking a quick phonemic awareness game during transitions, lining up, to start a lesson, or the rare occasion when I have just a few extra minutes.
Quick Phonemic Awareness Activities
Mystery Bag
For this activity, I prefill a paper bag or container with objects or pictures of objects that all have the same beginning, middle or end sound. Then, I show students all the objects in the bag at the same time. I ask them what sound all the objects have in common. For example, if my bag had pictures of a puppy, pumpkin, pie, and princess, my objects all start with the /p/ sound. If my bag had pictures of a dog, log, bag, and wig, my objects all end with the /g/ sound.
Sounds Like Sort
This is another activity where I will pull objects or pictures of objects by either beginning, middle or end sound. I will also pick two or three “category objects”. The class or students will then work together to sort the objects into the matching categories. For example, if my objects were a frog, fly, dog, kitten, dad, and cup, my guiding categories could be “dot”, “kite”, and “fry”. *Cup works in this example because phonemic awareness is sound recognition not letter based.
Word Chains or Word Ladders
Word chain worksheets or printables are often used to help students practice phonemic awareness skills, however, the challenge with worksheets is that once students write one word, they are using graphemes to support chaining a word.
While this does still support literacy skills, it is not an entirely authentic phonemic awareness activity. Instead, that worksheet or printable can be the teacher's guide for a chain of words and all of the work can be done auditorily by students. An example of what an oral word chain or ladder could be is:
Start with the word cat, change the first sound to /p/. What’s the new word? Pat
From pat, change the last sound to /n/. What’s the new word? Pan
From pan, change the middle sound to /ĭ/. What’s the new word? Pin
From pin, change the beginning sound to /sh/. What’s the new word? Shin
This activity can be easily differentiated to meet the needs of your students- if they are only able to change beginning sounds then you can keep it simple and only change beginning sounds (and work on on-set and rime too!).
Task Cards
Task cards are always a fun and easy way to support students with phonemic awareness activities. I love task cards because they can be used in both whole group teaching as a quick 1 minute drill or set out as an independent center for students. One of my favorite task cards is matching a picture to another picture with the same beginning, middle or end sound. Again, if you are really wanting to practice phonemic awareness, it is important to make sure that students are matching pictures and sounds and not using graphemes to match the pictures.
Count the Sounds
This activity helps students with segmenting individual sounds in a word. For this activity, I will give students a word and ask them to finger stretch the word. This involves saying the word slowly and stretching out each sound that they hear. I will often use this activity to frontload an upcoming phonics skill. If we are going to introduce digraphs soon, I will sprinkle in words that have that digraph so that students can begin to hear those sounds in words and recognize that they are a single sound.
Swap the Sound Student Check
We know that students LOVE checking the work of their teachers and this game let’s students have an opportunity to act as the checkers. I will give the students a riddle like phonemic awareness clue- example, “I have the word mat, if I change the first sound to /m/, then I have the word mat.” Then students have to act as the checkers and give me a thumbs up or thumbs down if I got the correct answer. Their favorite part (and mine too) is to give the incorrect word so they can “catch my mistake”. This might sound like, “I have the word mat, if I change the first sound to /m/, then I have the word mash.” If I give the wrong answer, the students have to then provide me with the right answer.
What Doesn’t Belong?
This is another activity that can be used for isolating beginning, middle or end sound. To play this game, I will give students a list of words that all have either the same beginning, middle, or end sound. Then I will throw in a word that doesn’t belong, it doesn’t match the pattern. Students then have to figure out which word doesn’t belong. This could look like a list of words with the same middle vowel sound and one word with a different vowel sound: cat, nap, flat, mix, tax, bag, mat. Students would identify that mix doesn’t belong because it doesn’t have the same middle vowel sound.
Make a List
Make a list is the perfect game for waiting in line. To play this game, I will provide a rule for the class, like the words needs to end with the /d/ sound. Then students will go down the line and each give a word that fits this rule. We love to keep score, and the class earns a point for every new, non repeated word. Students love to see how high we can get before we run out of words. This activity is also great for building vocabulary.
Where’s the Sound
This is another great activity that can be embedded throughout the day. To play Where’s the Sound, I start by giving the students a sound to listen for. Then, I will say a word that has the sound in it and students need to identify where the sound is at in the word. I love this activity because it is also easy to differentiate- you can put the sound in any position of the word or you could focus on one or two positions to help students simply hear the sound within the words. If you want to add an extra challenge, you can throw in words that do not have the sound at all, so students have to identify that the sound is not present in the word.
Let’s Go Camping!
This game is hands down a favorite in my classroom!
We typically will play this game in our morning meeting or while we are waiting in line. I will begin by telling students, "I am going to go camping and I am taking…" then I will pick 3-5 items to take camping with me that follow the “rule” or sound I want students to recognize. Once I have given students my items, they need to come up with items that fit the rule and ask if they can go camping. If their idea matches the rule, then I say, yes we can bring that camping. If their idea doesn’t match the rule, then I would say, no we cannot bring that camping. After 5-8 students have brought something camping, I will ask a student to reveal what our rule was. This game can be modified for beginning, middle or end sound.
Here is an example for a beginning /b/ sound activity:
Me: I am going to go camping and I am going to bring my bed, a bear, a bug, my bunny and a baby.
Student: Can I come camping and bring my ball? → Yes! We can take your ball camping.
Student: Can I come camping and bring my cat? → No, unfortunately we cannot take your cat camping.
Phonemic Awareness & The Science of Reading
As we learn more about the Science of Reading and how the brain learns to read, there are so many ways we can modify our instruction to provide a complete and comprehensive experience for students. I love finding small ways that I can change my literacy block that have a positive impact on students. If you are looking for more ways to make small changes in your literacy block, check out any of my other blog posts below.
If you are also looking for ways to help support your young readers with rhyming and other phonological awareness activities, check out my rhyming freebie currently available in the Bear and Bug Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Bringing Phonemic Awareness Into the Classroom
I have loved finding simple and easy phonemic awareness games that I can play with my students throughout the day. These games not only build their phonemic awareness skills and provide them with the tools they need to be readers, they also build our classroom community and culture. My students love these activities and I hope that your students love them too!
