Phonemic Awareness, that is hearing the sounds in spoken words, is an important part of pre-k and kindergarten instruction. As an intervention, working on phonemic awareness will occur in kindergarten and early in first grade.
Since we are not talking about letters at this stage of reading, read alouds are a great place for teaching phonemic awareness and uses several of the principles for intervention. Five minutes of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness daily is
plenty.
I don’t know if I have mentioned this before, but right now I am teaching a face-to-face group and a virtual group. In order to supply both groups, I have discovered that there is no better resource for balanced literacy like Literacy Footprints Digital Reader.
Literacy Footprings has allowed me not only to provide my students with valid and research based strategies, but also has allowed me to become a better teacher of reading. You see, this membership website also has Jan Richardson and Michelle Dufresne modeling how to teach working with sounds, for example.
Another example of teaching phonemic awareness online is by using picture cards from the story or nursey rhyme you are reading aloud. You can either read the story yourself or play a You Tube video of the story. After reading/hearing and enjoying the story you can show the children the cards you have for characters in the story. If I was using Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? by Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle. I could use cards for the animals and the colors to teach. I can break off the first part of the animal names: b-ear, b-ird, d-uck, h-orse, fr-og, d-og, sh-eep, f-ish. Or I could blend the sounds together by first stretching out the word and then say it like talking. Since the children only see the pictures you don’t need to talk about spelling, or blends, or any of that other phonics knowledge.
You can also use the pictures to talk about the color of the animals and segment and blend those too. Children at this age love to hear the same story many times so one day you can read the story and do animals one day and another day reread the story and do colors. You could also use the pictures to clap syllables. You would want to add a card for children and teacher when you do this since there aren’t many multi syllable words in this book.
This activity is good for any children’s book with multiple animals or characters, stories with many different fruits/foods, types of clothing etc. Multiple category stories work well for this activity and it can be delivered in any environment. I also wrote about phonemic awareness in THIS post.
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