Page 12 - Educators Guide Book

Phonemic Awareness

Ideas for Strengthening Phonemic Awareness:

• Have the child listen to and identify environmental sounds
• Have the child imitate rhythms by using instruments, or by banging or clapping their hands

• Have the child differentiate between initial and final sounds. State a word and ask the
child if the word begins with a specific sound. Once he/she can differentiate initial sounds
do the same for final sounds.

• Develop rhyming skills

• Listen to stories that incorporate rhymes

• Match rhyming pictures

• Create rhyming nonsense words

• Have the child isolate parts of words. Ask them to say a specific word and then say it
without a component (i.e. say cowboy without cow or without boy, say frog without f etc.)

• Have your student “crash” sounds together to build a word. When c and at crash it makes
the word cat.

• Have the child blend sounds to synthesize a word (i.e. c..a..t = cat)

• Inventive spelling - Have young children write captions on their drawings and encourage
phonetic spelling.

• Have the child sort pictures according to middle, beginning and end sounds.

• Have children tell you how many words there are in a sentence.
• Have your student clap out words to determine how many syllables are in a word.

12 Educator's Guide / Phonemic Awareness