Children need to use their listening skills to develop an awareness of what they can hear, so they can learn to discriminate all different sounds they encounter in the environment, including the sounds in speech. Book a hearing test for your child if you have any concerns that they cannot discriminate sounds, to ensure that they do not have a hearing impairment.
It is essential that children learn to discriminate speech sounds from other environmental sounds and be able to hear and isolate individual words in speech flow. Then they can learn to identify the structure of words in more detail.
Phonological awareness describes an important set of skills needed when learning to read and write. It is an awareness of the phonological structure i.e. the units of sounds in words comprising of different elements such as rhyme, syllables and alliteration. Phonemic awareness consists of hearing and manipulating the smallest unit of sound in a word i.e. a phoneme. To explain this, the word cat has 3 phonemes /c/ /a/ /t/ (referring to the individual sounds, not the invidividual letters) and the word shop also has 3 phonemes – /sh/ /o/ /p/. Difficulties learning these important phonological awareness skills can impact on reading and spelling and so it is important for children to be taught how to strengthen these skills at an early age by just listening to the sounds of words before beginning to look at written words and letters. However, if a child has difficulties learning these phonological skills, it does not mean that they should delay learning grapheme/phoneme corresondence, but phonological skills should continue to be practised at the same time.
Here are some ideas to help a child acquire and strengthen these skills. Note that no letters or words are used when starting to build up phonological awareness skills, the children are only listening, speaking and using pictures when required.
Rhyming
Rhyming helps learners develop their understanding of the sound structure in words.
Listen out for rhyming words e.g. cat, hat, mat explaining that a word rhymes if the last section of the word sounds the same. Sing nursery rhymes emphasising the rhyming words. Make up your own rhymes or change well known rhymes, e.g. Humpty Dumpty sat on a log, Humpty Dumpty saw a d _______. Can child finish the rhyme? Have three pictures, two that rhyme and an odd one out. Can child find the two objects that rhyme or can they find the odd one out.
Alliteration
Play games using the same sound starter so the child is hearing the initial sound – e.g. find objects that begin with the same sound as their name. Make up alliteration tongue twisters together i.e. Peter puts peas in pockets, Susie sits slowly on the sand. – what sound can they hear at the beginning of most of the words? Only put objects that begin with the target sound in the box.
Making Sounds
Children need to be aware how they make sounds with their mouths and how they can change those sounds. They need to experiment making quiet sounds, loud sounds, fast sounds and slow sounds. Talk about the features of the sounds e.g. long sounds, short sounds, changing the pitch from high to low. Provide mirrors for the children to observe their faces, lips, teeth and tongue as they experiment with different sounds. Explain that some sounds are voiced so we need to use our vocal chords, but some sounds are unvoiced, when we just use the air, tongue, teeth and mouth to make the sound. Experiment by seeing if the children can change the pitch of a sound if it is a voiced sound, but they won’t be able to if they are using a pure unvoiced sound (see video below how to articulate the sounds correctly). Unvoiced sounds are /s/, /f/, /p/, /t/, /k/, /sh/, /ch/, /th/ as in ‘thin’ (there is also a voiced /th/ sound as in ‘these’). It is important that the children understand that some of the sounds in words are unvoiced and how to move their mouths for different sounds so they articulate them correctly.
Word Isolation
Children need to recognise that sentences are made up of individual words and know how to isolate these words. Games can be made up to help understanding by selecting a simple picture and generating a short sentence e.g. He is eating. The child can then jump along hoops/square tiles or move a counter along a track saying the words as they move along – one space for each word.
Rhythm and Syllables
Children need to become aware of the rhythm/beat of songs and rhymes and then use this skill to identify syllables. Teach them to tap an instrument or clap to the beat of a nursery rhyme or song. Then progress to breaking words into these beats which are called syllables – start with their name and ask them to say the words slowly in a robot voice and clap the syllables e.g. Rob/ert, Jon/a/than. A simple way to explain to children how to identify syllables is to think about when they need to change the shape of their mouth to say the next bit of the word. For example, they can touch their chin as they say the word ‘hippopotamus’ and count the number of times their chin dropped. Therefore, they would count their chin moving 5 times as they said hip/po/pot/a/mus. When we clap out syllables we are really clapping on the vowel sound. Sort pictures or post into labelled boxes depending on how many syllables they have so the child has to count the syllables or use manipulatives. Can they take away a syllable in a word e.g. what would you have left from the word football if you took away the syllable ‘foot’? What if you took away the syllable /cil/ from the word pencil? Practise blending syllables together, counting them, breaking them up and deleting them from words. Check out the Nessy video below on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QcPb5bku70
PHONEMIC AWARENESS
Phonemic awareness refers to the specific ability to focus on and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Phonemes are the smallest units in spoken language. and combine to form syllables and words. Phonemic awareness needs to be built on to learn the following skills:
Blending
It is important that oral blending is modelled at first so that children have lots of experience of listening to what is expected before having to try themselves. Oral blending is listening to the individual phonemes of a word and then blending the phonemes (sounds of a word) together to say a word e.g. /d/ /o/ /g/ – dog, /f/ /i/ /sh/ – fish. Learners may find it easier at first to blend words which start with longer sounds such as /s/, /f/ or /m/. Continuous blending and arm blending both can help a child who finds this difficult as shown in the videos.
Play games when the adult segments (breaks a word into individual phonemes) and then immediately blends the word for the child to hear e.g. Touch your /h/ /ea/ /d/, head . Wriggle your /t/ /oe/ /s/, toes. Segment the word at the end of the sentence and only use one syllable words at first, modelling the blending for the child. When the child becomes confident in joining in and start to blend themselves only then remove the modelling of the word and see if the child can start to blend the phonemes themselves. Then play more games segmenting words for children to blend e.g. find the /p/ /e/ /g/ – can the child blend the phonemes, say the word and then link the word to an object? Ensure that only pure sounds are used to say the phonemes as shown in this you tube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWQ6MeccRCU
Segmenting
When the child becomes confident at blending, see if they want to be the ‘teacher’ and have a go at segmenting some words in the game by giving the instruction with the word segmented at the end. Help by counting the phonemes on fingers to check they have included them all. Play other games with objects that children are familiar with and just use words that contain three phonemes at first. Hide the objects in a box or bag and let the child say the three separate sounds for others to blend the sounds together to make the word and find the correct item. Can the children count how many phonemes are in a word? Use counters or fingers to count the phonemes.
Continue to practise blending and segmenting hand in hand as they are reversible processes.
Beginning Middle and End
Ensure the child understands the terms beginning, middle and end. Use three boxes on a phoneme frame or just drawn on paper and use counters to place in the boxes to represent the phoneme. Say a CVC word and then choose one of the sounds, can the learner place the counter in the correct box they hear the sound, is it at the beginning, middle or end.
Manipulation of Phonemes –Learning more new skills to aid reading and spelling
Once children can start to blend phonemes together orally, then see if they can start to manipulate these phonemes to raise their level of phonemic awareness skills. Ask the child to blend together some sounds e.g. /f/ /u/ /n/ so they are able to say the word ‘fun’ and then extend this by asking the learner to change the /f/ in ‘fun’ to a /r/, can they work out what the new word would be? /r/ /u/ /n/ – run.
Then see if the child can then delete phonemes in a word to say a new word e.g. what if you took away the /b/ in bus, can they work out that the new word would be ‘us’. Then try deleting the end phoneme, finally a middle phoneme e.g. say the word swift, what would the word be without the sound /w/?
These skills are all based on listening skills and are introduced before the written letters are shown. Phonological skills are a really important part of reading and spelling, so learners will continue to use and build on these skills throughout their lives. Those with dyslexia have weak phonological awareness and therefore need more teaching of these skills and more practise to become confident at reading and spelling. More details for teaching general sound discrimination, rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds, oral blending and segmenting can be found in various books and websites. I find particularly useful Phase One phonological awareness games detailed in the ‘Letters and Sounds’ DFE publication (2007) which can be accessed through the following link: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/190599/Letters_and_Sounds_-_DFES-00281-2007.pdf
I have also found the book ‘Sound Linkage: An Integrated Programme for Overcoming Reading Difficulties’ by Peter Hatcher very useful to support those children who are having difficulties strengthening their phonological awareness and phonemic skills.
Help your child learn to read, write and spell 