Reading FREEBIE! Phonemic Awareness Fun!!

How to make sure your students are set up for reading success!

• Nursery rhymes

• Pictures or visuals

• Riddles

• Oral language play

• Rhyming songs

• Poetry

Most teachers understand that students need to have phonological awareness to become good readers...... they just don't know why.  

Why?  

The development of phonological awareness is important for overall reading progress. 

Without phonemic awareness students may struggle with reading, even in upper elementary, high school or even in life. 

Phonemic awareness helps students to understand and internalize the alphabetic principle. Having a good understanding of the alphabetic principle is absolutely imperative for students to be able to read words that are unknown to them.  

For students that are lacking in phonemic awareness, letters and words can sometimes just look like garbled symbols or even unclear pictures.  Phonemic awareness must be explicitly taught to pre-school, kinder, and 1st grade students.  

While some children seem to "just pick up" on rhyming and blending sounds, most students need very explicit training and practice in this area.  Even older students that don't have these skills should have these gaps filled to prevent difficulty with literacy later.

Rhyming, blending word parts orally, blending phonemes, segmenting sounds, deleting initial sounds, and deleting final sounds must all be mastered for a student to be fully developed in the reading area of phonemic awareness. 

When you are working with students on these skills, you will want to begin instruction with oral language and the use of pictures.  

As your students gain a greater understanding, you can transition your students and incorporate printed letters and words. Letter to sound linking is another important skill that you will need to explicitly work on with your students.

Here in the great state of Texas, we use the TPRI (Texas Primary Reading Inventory) as one of the tools to assess our student's reading progress. The TPRI also gives us useful data on their Phonemic Awareness level of understanding and a student's individual progress in reading in general. 

There are numerous resources that can be used to find out where your students are with their level of understanding with Phonemic Awareness.  

The most important thing is that you assess your students and find out where they are so that you can meet their needs accordingly. You can even easily create your own simple assessment. You will be able to do a pretty thorough assessment with only using spoken words and possibly some pictures.  

It will benefit you and your students if you are able to find out which phonemic awareness skills they have mastered and which ones they are still lacking.  I plan to share some assessments with you in the very near future and I will link them to this page for you.

I have a FREE Phonemic Awareness activity kit that is designed to aid your students in the development of this learning area.  Besides the activities in my kit, the best thing you can do is to keep your students engaged!  Your students should be actively engaged in activities such as:

• Nursery rhymes

• Pictures or visuals

• Riddles

• Oral language play

• Rhyming songs

• Poetry

Nursery rhymes, telling riddles, and even reading aloud to your students will aid them along their way in gaining the alphabetic principle and ultimately reading unknown words fluently.

 

Drop That Sound is a phonemic awareness mini-kit freebie for you to use with your kiddos! The Phonemic Awareness mini-kit focuses on the following:

• Dropping the initial sound in a word spoken orally 

• Dropping the final sound in a word spoken orally

Included are picture cards with colorful clip art that I created for you to use with your students. Because you can not be with your students 24/7, the visuals in the kit will be a huge benefit to you.  With using the picture cards, students will be able to practice independently, with a partner, or in a small group. 

Your students will be more successful with these activities if you model for them or do the activities with your students several times before you turn them loose to work without you.  

 

If you think that this Phonemic Awareness Kit - Drop That Sound would be beneficial for your students, please click to get a FREE copy to use with your kiddos.  

Also, on my Teachers Pay Teachers Store- Apple Tree Learning, I have another Phonemic Awareness Kit that you might want to check out.  It is a larger kit with more hands-on activities and lessons.  

This kit - The First Sound!, focuses on isolating the initial sounds in oral language and spoken words.  As with the other kit, I created the colorful clip art for the picture cards. 

The First Sound also includes letter cards that you can use with your students once you see they are able to give you the beginning sound of a word that you are practicing with orally.  

Little by little, you will transition your students to link the sounds to the letters. 

Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope the freebie is useful for you and your students. 

What are some oral language activities you do with your student to increase phonemic awareness knowledge?