Intervention Strategies for Phonemic Awareness
Using effective strategies for phonemic awareness instruction is a must when helping struggling readers. Phonemic awareness is the base for strong reader, and is an important part of reading intervention. I’ve gathered a list of reading intervention strategies for you that specifically target phonemic awareness, and are perfect to use with your beginning readers or struggling readers.
Phonemic awareness ideas to use in reading intervention.
For general reading intervention strategies you can use with any subject, check out this post!
Strategies for phonemic awareness intervention.
What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is a lot less concrete than learning letters or reading a story, and can be a bit confusing. It’s a super common question to wonder, “What is phonemic awareness??” Phonemic awareness is simply dealing with just the sounds in words and sentences. Leave all the print and letters behind, and just have students listen to and produce the sounds. I will have another post that explains all about phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and the difference between the two soon, so stay posted!
Why phonemic Awareness is important
Proficiency in phonemic awareness is one of the number one predictors for future reading success! It is the foundation that is laid for all of the other skills to build off of, and often times it is skipped. One of the biggest problems for struggling readers is when they do master phonemic awareness skills, but their instruction continues to move onto the higher skills like phonics and fluency. This is a very common problem, as phonemic awareness is often only taught until the first half of first grade. A great starting place for intervention is to give a phonemic awareness assessment to see if they are struggling, and then start your reading intervention there.
If you need help figuring out if your students need help with phonemic awareness, you can download this free reading intervention cheat sheet. It gives you characteristics of students struggling in phonemic awareness, and other areas, so you can see what matches up with your students.
Find phonemic awareness and other reading intervention ideas in this cheat sheet.
Strategies for Phonemic Awareness
Easy activities for phonemic awareness practice.
Phonemic awareness strategy #1: Bounce the Initial Sound
This is one of the first and most basic phonemic awareness strategies to do with beginning readers. When teaching initial sounds, “bounce” the first sound of the word. For example, when talking about the word “dog”, you would say “d-d-dog, dog starts with the sound /d/”. You can use this phonemic awareness strategy naturally throughout the day. You can use it during read alouds to model listening to a word, you can use it as you walk down the hall with different things you pass, or you can use student names and it makes a great morning meeting activity!
Phonemic awareness blending and segmenting activities.
Phonemic awareness strategy #2: Model Blending and Segmenting
Blending and segmenting are precursor skills to sounding out words and spelling. They are tricky, but very important skills to develop. Modeling and then practicing together are great phonemic awareness activities to help with blending and segmenting. When blending, show students how to say the sounds closer and closer together to make a word. When segmenting, show how to stretch the sounds out so they can hear each sound. Because these are tricky skills, a lot of modeling and showing examples will help.
Activities for phonemic awareness can be engaging.
Phonemic awareness strategy #3: Physical Movement
Having a physical act to do with each sound will help students separate the sounds more distinctly, plus it will appeal to all of your kinesthetic learners. For more activities that appeal to kinesthetic learners (and all other kinds of learners!) here is my Ultimate List of Reading Intervention Activities blog post you can read for tons of ideas.
When blending, you can have students move their pointer finger in a straight line in the air while they blend the sounds, or use an arm slide.
- To use an arm slide, have students stick one arm straight out and put their other hand at the top of their shoulder. Then for each sound in the word, they tap a little further down their arm. When they’ve said each sound, they go back up to the top of their arm, and slide their hand down their arm as they say the whole word.
- To see a video example of arm slides, you can check out my “Teaching” Story Highlights on Instagram (the purple circle with the apple).
When segmenting, you can have students take a step for each sound in a word, hold up a finger for each sound, or do my favorite, disco reading! Have students do a “disco move” for each sound in the word as they segment (put one hand on their hip and hold out the other hand with finger pointing out; then bring the finger back across the body by their other hand; alternate between positions).
Phonemic awareness strategies include focusing on rhymes.
Phonemic awareness strategy #4: Rhymes
Exposure to rhymes at an early age helps bring attention to the sounds words make and introduces awareness to phonemic awareness. Listening to nursery rhymes, rhyming books, songs, and poems are a great way to support this awareness. If students did not get this at an early age, it is important for them to get this in school. If you are working with older students, you can still find age appropriate ways to foster phonemic awareness with rhymes besides using nursery rhymes. There are a ton of fun rhyming books out there, or you can even practice fun chants or sing songs, or read children’s poetry. I love using these fun rhyming puzzles that just focus on CVC words for beginning rhymers.
games for phonemic awareness can increase engagement
Phonemic awareness strategy #5: Word Play Games
Games are such a great way to disguise phonemic awareness strategies! I love the game “Guess My Word” because it hits blending AND segmenting. Start with just the teacher being “it”. Choose a word and say the sounds in it. Students have to listen and blend the sounds together to guess the word. When they are ready, students can take turns being “it” and choose the word to give the sounds to. This way, they get to practice segmenting the sounds as they give the clue.
Phonemic awareness can be taught using actions like clapping and patting.
Phonemic awareness strategy #6: Clapping and Patting
Again, kinesthetic movement helps here, along with the tactile and auditory aspects of clapping and patting. It gives students a more tangible action to connect with the sounds. Since counting the words in sentences, syllables in words, and sounds in words can all be so confusing and get mixed up easily, I like to choose one thing to use for each skill. So you can have students pat their lap to count how many words there are in sentences, make a fist and pound it in their other open hand to count syllables, and clap to count sounds in words.
phonological awareness can be enhanced by using pictures and visuals
Phonemic awareness strategy #7: Visual Cues
For your visual learners, it helps to use visual phonemic awareness strategies, like pictures or dots, slides, or arrows. Show a picture with each word you are working on to help create context and to give independence (they can say the word themselves if they are at a center or by themselves). You can break the picture up into pieces to help show the concept of segmenting, or place dots under the picture for each sounds. To show blending, place an arrow under the picture, draw lines between the dots, or place the dots down a picture of a slide. My Phonemic Awareness Intervention Binder has tons of visual activities you can use with students without any prep involved.
Strategies for phonemic awareness are more effective with tangible manipulatives.
Phonemic awareness strategy #8: Touching and Moving Manipulatives
The last strategy for phonemic awareness I use is for those hands-on learners. Manipulatives add engagement and a concrete element to an abstract concept. Bingo chips, pom poms, mini-erasers, or even candy work great. Place a manipulative for each sound under a picture of the word. Then have the student move the manipulative up with one finger as they say the sound in each word. You can use tap lights from the dollar store too. They just tap a light for each sound, turning them on as they go. You can also use toy cars to practice smoothly blending sounds together. Just “drive” the car under the picture (preferably with dots or spaces under the picture for each sound) as you say the sounds. Check out the “Reading Intervention Tools” category in my Amazon Store for some affiliate links to fun manipulatives.
I hope this list gives you a ton of strategies for phonemic awareness ideas, and that you are able to give your students the solid foundation in phonemic awareness that they need. It is such a vital skill that is easily looked over, but can make the biggest difference!
Happy teaching!
P.S. If you’re looking for a way to reach your struggling readers, but just don’t know how, download my free Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet as a guide for identifying WHO is struggling, WHAT they’re struggling with, and HOW to help them.
