Teaching Phonemic Awareness

This video is a short explanation about the use of a blending board to teach phonemic awareness. The blending board is a fun way for students to “mix up” animal parts to make their own animal board to work with. In addition, the teacher uses little animal pieces or solid circles to segment and blend sounds of words. I liked the technique of segmenting the word visually using manipulatives. My only concern is that the students may get distracted with both the animal blending board and the animal manipulatives. I can see how this can be engaging for some, but I also imagine that other students may not be able to focus on the purpose of the activity, which is phonemic awareness. 

 

This video shows a very simple, yet effective way to teach onset-rime blending. The teacher brings in a puppet and explains that the puppet can only speak in a certain way (with a separation of onset-rime). The students were quickly able to identify that the puppet says words with the first sound of the word first, and then the rest of the word after. I really like the idea of bringing an outside manipulative in to teach students how to separate the onset and rime. I found it engaging for the students and also helpful to remember how to segment onset and rime.

 

This video displays a creative and engaging lesson teaching phoneme substitution. The teacher uses a book called “Diary of a Worm”, where the main character, a worm, ate the first sound of every word on his homework. It was the students’ job to figure out what sound was “eaten” off the words. When doing this, the teacher introduced other sounds that could also fit as the beginning sound of the words. The teacher used the “thumbs up or thumbs sideways” to allow students to confirm or question each student’s decision if the sounds make sense. Overall, I thought this was a really interesting and effective approach to teaching the very beginning of phoneme substitution to students.