Phonological Awareness Activities:
Rhyming Activities: Rhyming is one of the first ways that children learn to manipulate the sounds and patterns of language.
- Look through magazines and newspapers and find pictures of words that rhyme. Remember that you want to find words that rhyme by sound rather than by spelling (i.e., socks and box, rather than food and good). Play memory games or Go Fish with the pictures you find.
- Read familiar nursery rhymes. Dr. Seuss Easy Reader books or other easy rhyming books, emphasizing the rhyming words as you read. Encourage your child to recite memorized nursery rhymes and clap on the rhyming words. Or read the stories and pause before each rhyming word to give your child a chance to fill it in (i.e., Jack and Jill went up the ).
- Create rhyming books by making up riddles of your own together. Then write them down and illustrate them. Write the riddle on the front of the page and the answer on the back. An example: I know something that goes tick-tock. I has hands and a face. It’s a clock!
- Say a word and ask your child to give you a rhyming word. This can be fun to do while riding in the car or taking a walk.
Segmenting Sentences and Compound Words: The ability to segment (or break apart) and blend together sounds in words is essential for early reading and spelling success. Before these skills can be truly mastered, children first learn to manipulate compound words and words in sentences. This is a another skill that demonstrates how well a child has mastered “breaking the code” of our language.
- Say a silly sentence and ask your child how many words he/she hears (i.e., Suzy sank her ship in the sand = 7 words).
- Say a short sentence to your child. Clap out the sentence, on clap for each word (i.e., Grandma is coming on Wednesday. = 5 words). Be sure to count the words and not the syllables (that comes later). Or, you can clap out sentences you hear your child say. Who can make the longest sentence that makes sense? Take sentences out of your favorite stories or make up your own.
- Blend words to make compound words. Think of some compound words (i.e., jellyfish, skateboard, campfire, goldfish, pancake, snowman, etc.). Look for pictures in magazines for the root words (i.e., jelly, fish, pan, fire, cake, etc.). Put tow pictures together and what is your new compound word? Draw a picture of the new word (i.e,, a pictures of snow + a picture of a ball = snowball).
- After you have made some compound words with your pictures, ask your child, “What is the first word in snowball? What is the last word?
- Another variation of compound word games is to say, “Say snowman. Now say it again but don’t say snow.” Leave off either the initial or final word in the compound word.
Segmenting Words into Syllables: This is the next step in breaking the code of our language.
- Start by clapping out the syllables in their name. You might want to try family member names. Whose name has the most syllables? Look through picture books. Take turns picking out pictures and see who can find the picture whose label has the most syllables.
Phonemes in Words: Phoneme (sound) level skills include isolation, segmentation, blending, deletion, and substitution.
- Isolation: What is the first sound in “sand”? Make sure your child says the sound /s/ and not the letter “s”. What is the last sound in sand? What do you hear before /n/? Use as many combinations of questions as you can think of.
- Segmentation: Take a word from a story (i.e., sand). Ask your child to say the sounds in the word by saying the sound for each picture. (s…a…n…d).
- Blending: Take a word from the story (i.e.,sand). Say each sound for your child. Ask your child to say the sounds and then blend them together to tell you what the word is.
- Deletion: After your child has done segmentation or blending for a word, say to him/her, “Say sand. Now say it again without the /n/.” The word would be “sad.” Then try, “Say sand. Now say it again without the /s/.” The word would be “and.”
- Substitution: After your child has done segmentation, blending, or deletion for a word, say to him/her, “Say sand. Change /s/ to /b/. What is the word? The word becomes “band.”