Great Activities to Improve Phonemic Awareness

Segmenting

This segmenting activity is easy to do and it doesn't require any materials but your hands! Have your child/class place their hands together. Give them a word. Each time they hear a sound in a word, have them say it and move their hands further apart.

Silly Putty

This is the same concept as the segmenting activity above, only using silly putty to stretch the sounds in words. Using the silly putty helps children to visualize words that have a few sounds and words that have many sounds. (Children really get excited when they find words with many sounds, causing the silly putty to break apart).

Stretching Mat

This way of stretching words is great for students who like movement! Use a yoga mat and begin by explaining that it's important to stretch your body before you can stretch your brain. Give your child a set of directions to stretch their body. For example, tell them to slowly touch their toes, reach high in the air, place arms out to the side, and roll their head slowly. Once they have stretched their bodies, they are ready to stretch words! A fantastic multi-sensory phonemic awareness activity.

Night Lights

Using inexpensive night lights is a great way to help children learn to say sounds in words. Line up the night lights and say a word. Have your child say the sounds in the word as they turn the lights on. Repeat this process with the same word, but have your child say the sounds while they turn off the night lights. (It's always a good idea to teach your child to work from left to right! This typically is best to do in the small group setting when working on 1-4 phoneme words).

Magnet Segmenting

Using magnets and a cut-apart egg carton, place a magnet in each slot. Give your child a word with 1-6 phonemes and have them pick up a magnet while they say each sound. Like in the previous activity, it's best to teach your child to work from left to right.

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Thank you to our Room 7 teacher here at Muritai School for passing on this information from The Handy Resources blog (www.handyres.com)




We Move too Quickly from Decoding to Critical Thinking

The assumption is made that because our readers can ‘read’ we can move from ‘Learning to Read’ to ‘Reading to Learn’. This is particularly evident in our inquiry based curriculum which focuses on self-directed learning. Unfortunately, our students don’t have the tools to process text. The result for the kids (and the teachers) – frustration, disengagement, and a ‘cut and paste’ mentality.

The development of reading skills goes beyond the mechanics of decoding – getting the words right. Students need to be explicitly taught comprehension strategies so that they can construct meaning, which then frees them for the critical thinking required by truly self-directed inquiry learning.

How to make a start teaching your students to construct meaning:
Take a sentence or a paragraph from a story and model the thinking aloud that you do when you construct meaning ‘as you read’.

1. Do this one sentence at a time.
2. Use “I think that means...” as a sentence starter.
3. Encourage your students to have a go. (“I think that means...” is very safe because you can’t be wrong).
   

You will be surprised at what they come up with – the occasional gem of insight but more often than not the misinterpretation of text that you thought they understood because they could ‘read’ it.

So it could go like this ... “All his life Ben had hated vegetables. I think that means that the boy or the man in the story had never been able to eat vegetables. They made him sick“; or “I think that means that every time this person Ben saw a vegetable he wanted to destroy it.”

Suddenly you have an interesting new window into how your students process sentences....