PHONICS

This exercise is to be conducted while reading with an individual student, small group, or the whole class. The goal is to provide students with practice blending (combining) and segmenting (separating) sounds. 

Blending: 

• Guess-the-word game: use props to slowly sound out words, while allowing the students to guess

• Robot talk: students hear segmented sounds in "robot talk," which they will learn to put together

• Oral blending activity

Segmenting:

1. Teach children to segment sentences into individual words. Identify familiar short poems such as "I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream!" Have students clap their hands with each word.

2. Next, teach them to segment words into syllables or onsets and rimes. For example, have children segment their names into syllables: e.g., Ra-chel, Al-ex-an-der, and Rod-ney.

3. When children have learned to remove the first phoneme (sound) of a word, teach them to segment short words into individual phonemes: e.g., s-u-n, p-a-t, s-t-o-p.

• Segmenting cheer activity

• Segmenting with puppets

Concept of word refers to the ability of a reader to match spoken words to written words while reading. This demonstrates the student's ability to understand that each word is separate, and separated by a space in the sentence. These activities can be used before, during, or after reading with an individual student, small group, or the whole class.

• Dictation with lines for writing

• Be the sentence: Have each student physically represent a word in a sentence that the teacher creates. Create single-page size cards for each student, with one word on each card (for example "We" "went" "to" "the" "store"). Students work together to arrange themselves into the proper order to form a sentence.

• Cut-up sentence: Teachers prepare a sheet of simple sentences printed out with a large-size font. Students cut apart the words from a sentence, and then move the individual word cards around, manipulating the words to re-create the sentence in proper order.

• General activities

"The "onset" is the initial phonological unit of any word (e.g. c in cat) and the term "rime" refers to the string of letters that follow, usually a vowel and final consonants (e.g. at in cat). Not all words have onsets. Similar to teaching beginning readers about rhyme, teaching children about onset and rime helps them recognize common chunks within words. This can help students decode new words when reading and spell words when writing." These activities should be run before reading either with individual students, small groups, or the whole class.

• Onset and Rime Slide

• Rime House

• Rime Closed Sort

• Construct-a-word game

Rhyme groups together words by their common sound, for example the "-at" family — cat, hat, and sat. Students can use these rhyme families when learning to read. These activities should be run before reading either with individual students, small groups, or the whole class.

• Rhyme book: Students can draw pictures of objects that rhyme or cut out rhyming pictures found in magazines and place them in their books.

• Rhyming activities

• Rhyming words: body parts game: Learn how to play this simple rhyming game, where kids think of words that rhyme with different body parts such as "head" or "eye."​

• Space-themed rhyming game

The division or "chunking" of syllables helps students decode words faster and easier. These activities should be run before reading either with individual students, small groups, or the whole class.

• Multisyllabic word manipulation

• Syllable clapping

• Jumping syllables

Elkonin boxes segment words into individual sounds, or phonemes. This allows the child to make the association between the sound and the segment. This activity is effective with individual students or in small groups.

Elkonin boxes resources