Phonemic Awareness Activities for Children

Koh Larn

If you found this article then the chances are good that you already know what phonemic awareness activities are. You might not realize just how important they can be though. Rhyming word activities are one of the most common activities but there are obviously quite a few different ones. Syllable segmentation, sound substitution, sound isolation, and phonemic segmentation are all equally important.

Let's talk about sound substitution today because I find this extremely important. For this, you'll want to ask the children riddles that require them to manipulate sounds in their heads - endings are the easiest for the children. An example is like this:

"What is the ending sound of the word jug?"

The most difficult ones are where you ask for a consonant blend or digraph at the beginning, here's an example of that:

"What rhymes with leg and starts with a /p/?"

A great song that you can use for teaching sound substitution is "I've Been Working on the Railroad" by Yopp (1992). Make sure all of your children or students know the song and then you'll want to substitute a consonant sound for the beginning of each word of the song - for example:

"Fee-Fi-Fiddle-ee-I-Oh" "Bee-Bi-Biddle-ee-I-Oh" "Dee-Di-Diddle-ee-I-Oh" "Hee-Hi-Hiddle-ee-I-Oh"

Old Mac Donald Had a Farm is another great song for this because you can change out words depending on the animal being used - this song is also by Yopp (1992). Here's an example of that:

For a cow, sing, "kee-high,kee-kigh,koh!" For a sheep, you can sing, "shee-shigh,shee-shigh, shoh!"

That pretty much covers sound substitution. You should no enough about that phonemic awareness activity to get started, but you'll still want to learn about the other forms of it.

Posted in: Activities, Awareness, Children, Phonemic