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Phonemic Awareness: Part 4: Teaching Strategies
The Standards Connection: Print the Ohio Language Arts
Phonics Activity file:
OH
Language Arts Phonics Activity.doc and
Phonics Standards Activity Chart.doc
The file called OH LangArtsPhonics Activity.doc lists the standard
related to phonics, as well as the benchmarks and indicators for
the standard. This standard only goes through third grade. Cut apart
the indicator cards. Sort them by these categories on the chart
(PhonicsStandardsActivityChart.doc):
-Phonological Awareness
-Phonemic Awareness
-Visual Discrimination
-Word Recognition
-Fluency
As you can see, the State of Ohio requires teachers to focus on
all of these areas. It is important to make sure you are covering
all of the standards for your grade level.
For you convenience, here is a file that contains all of the k-3
OH Language Arts Standards, benchmarks, and indicators. OH
LangArts k-3.doc
Sample Lessons:
Look at the various teaching ideas that follow. Select ten of them
to incorporate in your reading teaching toolbox. Find a standard
that supports you teaching each lessons you selected.
Lessonplanz.com has a series of phonemic awareness lesson plans.
Go to:
http://lessonplanz.com/Lesson_Plans/Language_Arts/__Grades_K-2/Phonemic_Awareness/index.shtml
Look at the various teaching ideas in that site. Find a standard
that supports teaching each lesson you selected.
Remember, phonemic awareness is a conscious perception of the
sounds of language; that is, the recognition that what we may hear
or think of as a single utterance or sound, such as a word, is actually
made up of a string of smaller sounds, phonemes. Phonemic awareness
activities can be done in the dark as they are about hearing the
sounds of the language. They include such activities as:
1. Phoneme Blending: This is the ability to take
isolated sounds and blend them into words. C-a-t makes cat. Do the
same with a variety of other simple words, both with long and short
vowels. Include consonant blends in this activity as well.
2. Phoneme Segmentation: This is the opposite
of phoneme blending. Segmentation is breaking words apart into their
composite sounds. Cat = c-a-t. Be sure to cover the while gamut
of vowels, consonants, blends and diagraphs when choosing words
to segment.
3. Rhyming: This is the ability to recognize and
create rhyming words. Rhyming activities can be simply naming words
that rhyme, changing initial sounds to make rhyming words, listening
for rhyming words in a poem, or creating word families with onsets
and rimes
4. Syllables: Children need to be able to hear
the syllables within a word. The first introduction to this is usually
clapping syllables. However, other strategies, like putting down
a finger for each syllable should also be taught, especially when
children need to tell how many syllables are in longer words.
Other good lessons are on the proteacher.com website: http://www.proteacher.com/070171.shtml
Here are some video clips of a kindergarten teacher, Angi, working
with her children in phonemic awareness.
 |
Watch
a VIDEO CLIP (click here) |
| Description: Angi does phonemic awareness
activities with her kindergarten students. First they segment,
i.e. break apart a word she gives them into the sounds they
hear. Then she reinforces the idea of beginning, middle, and
ending sounds by having the children stand up and touch their
head when they say beginning sound, their waist when they say
the middle sound, and their toes when they say the ending sound.
Phonemic awareness activities are auditory: they are all about
what you hear rather than what you see. Adding the kinesthetic
activity of touching the body and moving allows children to
work in two modalities, or learning styles, making the information
more likely to stick in the children’s minds. This activity
asked children to break words into their component sounds. |
|
Watch
a VIDEO CLIP (click here) |
| Description: Angi does segmenting (a phonemic
awareness activity) with the words for the characters in The
Little Red Hen. Again she adds the kinesthetic by asking them
to stand up and touch the parts of their body that represent
the beginning, middle, and ending sounds. This time she speeds
it way up and slows it way down, which engages the children
even more. |
|
Watch
a VIDEO CLIP (click here) |
| Description: Angi continues phonemic awareness
by asking the children to change sounds in words. Take off the
first sound in “cat” and you get “at.”
Add a “ch” sound and you get “chat.”
|
|
Watch
a VIDEO CLIP (click here) |
| Description: Angi is now working with the
group on a big book, The Little Red Hen. She focuses on yet
another aspect of phonemic awareness, sounding out the word
and asking the children to blend those sounds into a word, i.e.
put a word together. |
|
Watch
a VIDEO CLIP (click here) |
| Description: Angi asks the children segment
the word “little.” Then she asks them to clap the
syllables, demonstrating the difference between the two. There
are more sounds in “little” than syllables. The
kindergarten children appear to be able to tell the difference. |
|
Watch
a VIDEO CLIP (click here) |
| Description: Heather, a second grade teacher,
discusses with the children the strategies they used to figure
out how many syllables are in a word. Notice that she is open
to whatever ideas the children have. She points out that fingers
may actually work better for longer words, like “watermelon.” |
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