Developing phonological awareness

Ways to Build Phonological Awareness in Pre-K and Kindergarten

There are a few ways kids in pre-K and kindergarten can get ready to read. One way is by noticing and playing with the words, rhymes, and syllables they hear in everyday speech. This called phonological awareness.

Kids also start to tune in to the individual sounds or phonemes in words. This is called phonemic awareness. The more you can build on these early “pre-reading” skills, the more prepared your child will be for the challenge of learning to read.

1. Listen up.

Good phonological awareness starts with kids picking up on sounds, syllables and rhymes in the words they hear. Read aloud to your child frequently. Choose books that rhyme or repeat the same sound. Draw your child’s attention to rhymes: “Fox, socks, box! Those words all rhyme. Do you hear how they almost sound the same?”

It also helps to point out repeated sounds. For example, if you’re reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, ask your child to listen to the /fffff/ sound in fish. (Really stretch the sounds out at first.) Outside of story time, try pointing out other words that start with the /fffff/ sound, just like in the book.

2. Focus on rhyming.

Ask your child to pick out the rhyming words in books without your help. Ask, “Did you hear a word that rhymes with fox?” Teach your child nursery rhymes and practice saying them together. Or say four short words, like log, cat, hog, frog. See if your child can pick out the word that doesn’t rhyme.

3. Follow the beat.

Make syllables easier to understand by clapping the “beats” your child hears in words. Let’s say you choose the word elephant. Pause as you say each syllable — e-le-phant — and clap out each syllable together. You can also get your child up and moving by having your child stomp or jump with each syllable.

4. Get into guesswork.

Guessing games such as “I spy” can be used to work on almost any phonological skill. Want to practice noticing what sounds word begin with? Try “I spy something red that starts with /s/.” Want to work on rhymes? “I’m wearing something warm that rhymes with boat.”

5. Carry a tune.

Singing in general is a great way to get kids rhyming. There are also good songs teachers use to focus on other kinds of phonological and phonemic awareness skills. “Apples and Bananas” is a fun one. You can search online for more songs about phonemic awareness or ask your child’s teacher for recommendations.

6. Connect the sounds.

Sound blending is an important skill for early readers. They need to put sound units — phonemes — together to be able to read a word smoothly. You can help your child start working on this by putting together sounds of different words. Ask your child to connect the beginning sound with the rest of a word. For example, say, “Start with /p/ and add /ig/. What do word do you hear if you put them together?”

7. Break apart words.

Have your child work on hearing a word and taking it apart. Start by using compound words such as cowboy, baseball or firefly. Tell your child, “Say the word cowboy. Now take away boy. What word is left?”

You can also use LEGO bricks to make this point. Give your child two attached LEGO bricks to represent parts of the word. Then have your child physically take the LEGO pieces apart while removing part of the word.

8. Get creative with crafts.

Kids respond to hands-on learning. Try making a collage of items that start with the same sound using pictures from magazines. Sock puppets can be another fun way to work on these skills. Make one that likes to munch on words that start with a certain sound. Let your child have fun “feeding” the puppet different objects or pictures that start with that sound.

9. Search online.

There are many resources and ideas online to work on phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Check out YouTube for teaching videos, Pinterest for games and crafts, or the app store for nursery rhymes, sound games, and songs.

Whatever you do, keep the activities short and fun. If your child finds one activity too difficult or boring, try something different. If you find that activities of this type are too hard, talk to your classroom teacher. Your district’s early childhood department may also be able to help you get extra help.

Key takeaways

There are many ways to include sound play in your daily routine with your child.
Kids who play with sounds, syllables and rhymes when they are young are gaining important reading readiness skills.
If these skills are really difficult for your child, you may want to seek extra support in this area.

Examples to promote phonological awareness

This page has example activities to develop the major phonological awareness skills. It is important to remember that phonological awareness activities do not have to occur with the written letters. Initially, working on phonological awareness takes place without the written word (using real objects, pictures, and counters for instance).

As phonological awareness activities develop it is important for students to participate in phonological awareness activities that link sounds (phonemes) to letter patterns (graphemes).

Allington et al. (1998) note the importance of using a range of resources purposefully such as nursery rhymes, riddles, songs, poems, and read-aloud books that manipulate sounds to draw young learners’ attention to the sounds of spoken language.

For example, using a familiar rhyme such as Five Little Monkeys provides a playful and meaningful context for young learners:

Five little monkeys jumping on the bed
One fell off and bumped his head
Mama called the doctor and the doctor said,
“No more monkeys jumping on the bed!”

Phonological awareness activities and lessons should broadly involve:

Highlighting phonological awareness concepts in songs, rhymes, poems, stories, and written texts
Finding patterns of rhyme, initial/final sound, onset/rime, consonants and vowels, by:
Matching pictures to other pictures
Matching pictures to sound-letter patterns (graphemes)
Matching pictures to words
Matching words to other words
Using games to practise the awareness of syllables, rhyme, initial/final sound, and individual sounds in words.

The examples below provide some ways to incorporate phonological awareness into everyday classroom activities.

Example activities:

Students sit in a circle. Each student claps the syllables in their name e.g. Lu-cy (clap, clap)

This could also be done with claves, other forms of body percussion

Group time rhymes with movement, stamping feet for the beat or syllable - e.g. feet, feet, feet, feet, march-ing up and down the street

Mystery bag - fill with familiar objects, students pull out an object, name it, clap the syllables - e.g. 'lion' - li-on, 'ball' - ball, 'octopus' - oct-o-pus

Set up a t-chart on the carpet (could use string or masking tape), children choose an object from around the room to bring to the carpet and classify depending on the number of syllables e.g. the t-chart may have 1-syllable and 2+ syllables, children place their objects accordingly (hat in 1 syllable, pen-cil in 2+ syllable)

Foundation Level Lesson: Developing Syllable Awareness

Text: I Went Walking by Sue Williams and Julie Vivas

About the text: A little girl goes for a walk and meets a number of colourful farm animals along the way.

The text contains

Repeated sentence structures
Questions and answers
Supporting text matching the illustrations
Rhythm and rhyme

Links to the Curriculum

Victorian Curriculum (English), Reading and Viewing: Language-Expressing and developing ideas:
Foundation: Recognise that texts are made up of words and groups of words that make meaning (Content description VCELA144)

Victorian Curriculum (English), Reading and Viewing: Literacy-Interpreting, analysing, evaluating:
Foundation: Read texts with familiar structures and features, practising phrasing and fluency, and monitor meaning using concepts about print and emerging phonic, semantic, contextual and grammatical knowledge (Content description VCELY152)

Victorian Curriculum (English), Speaking and Listening: Language-Phonics and word knowledge:
Foundation: Identify rhyming words, alliteration patterns, syllables and some sounds (phonemes) in spoken words (Content description VCELA168)

Theory/practice connections

A component of phonology is syllable awareness. Understanding syllables, that is, understanding that words can be broken up into parts, helps students to decode words when reading and spell words when writing. Before focusing on syllables in print, it is important that students develop an auditory awareness of syllables. Children’s literature which has rhymes and repetition provides an engaging context for students to develop their skills in syllabification.

Additional resources

Objects and pictures for follow up work.

Learning Intentions

We are learning to identify the syllables in words.

Success Criteria

I can clap the rhythm of the text.

I can clap the syllables in words with one, two or three syllables.

I can classify words into groups according to the number of syllables.

Role of the Reader

Text decoder – applying syllabification knowledge to decoding text

Group Size

Small group

Lesson Process

Read I Went Walking to the students, encouraging choral reading of the text.
Repeat the reading, encouraging students to read along and clap to the rhythm of the text.
Have the text written on long sentence strips and use a pointer to highlight syllables. Students clap along to the rhythm and identify the words that have two claps (two syllables) – walking, looking, yellow
Read again and use different body percussion for one and two syllable words.
Read again and students use percussion instruments to highlight syllables.
Students focus on the colour of the animals and find the colours that have two claps.
Follow up activity: Students classify objects or pictures according to the number of syllables.

Assessment

Ask students to clap out parts of the text.

Differentiation

For beginning readers, syllables can be identified through claps and discussed as ‘the claps in words’. Once students are comfortable with the concept, the term syllables can be used.

rhyming card games
sorting objects by rhyme
storybooks with rhyme - e. g. Hairy Maclary, Room on the Broom, The Gruffalo
I have, who has? Students have a card/object, they need to find the other student in the class that has a card/object that rhymes with theirs - e.g. the student with a frog needs to find the student with a dog
book with song - One Elephant Went Out To Play
using songs with actions to highlight rhyming:
My hands a feeling chilly,
I think they're turning blue I need something to warm them up but what can I do?
I can rub them, rub them, wriggle them around,
I can shake them, shake them and bang them on the ground.
I can rub them, rub them, wriggle them around,
I can shake them, shake them and bang them on the ground.

For more information, see: In-Practice Example: Identifying and generating rhyming words

poetry reading - Kenn Nesbitt has some examples, also how to write poems using alliteration
analysing a poem to find all the alliteration (this can be highlighted)
book reading - e. g. Fox in Socks (Dr Seuss), Hairy Maclary
making up own alliteration poems as a class/small groups
using tongue-twisters

using (and/or making) word wheels, recording the words made. This can be done individually on small whiteboards or posters in groups
sorting words by rime - this could be done on the interactive whiteboard, students can move words into like groups, e.g. all the words ending in -at grouped together
'chunks' game - students choose an onset and rime, if it makes a real word they keep it, if it is a non-word it goes back in the pile. e.g. 'tr' and 'ack' = track - real word, 'cl' and 'at' = clat - non-word
matching games with onset card and corresponding rime card (e.g. sparklebox resources)
roll a word - onset (one dice), rime (second dice), read the word then write down under word/non-word
word families

For more information, see: In-Practice Example: Blend and segment onset and rime

sorting objects or pictures by the initial or final sounds
bingo
labelling initial sounds of objects in a drawing response
word study - highlighting initial sounds and final sounds