Phonemic Awareness Mat

Phonemic Awareness Mat Activities

The ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words is a very important and foundational skill to have.  Students who have difficulty with this skill or who don't have practice enough practice can have difficulty with reading and spelling in the future.

Here are is list of activities you can do using the mat below to practice/play with phonemic awareness

• parent says a three letter or sound word; (mat), child should touch each box and say the sounds the correlating sound (/m/  /a/  /t/).
• Parent says a word and child isolates the beginning, middle, or ending sound. 
• Do the above activity and have the child say the word without the first sound.  (mat)   The child says (at).
• Building words.  Have your child build a three sound word (hot). Say the sounds by touching the blocks then add the letters that correlate with those sounds.  Parent "take the word hot and change it to not".  (do not move the letters from the mat, say the sounds of the new word and have your child try to figure out which sound changes).
• Building words-manipulate the first and last sounds as well.

Using letter tiles children can manipulate the sounds to make new words.
Phonemic Awareness Mat

Blending

Blending Sounds

You are all excited, your child is able to identify all the letter sounds! They are ready for the next step in reading.  They sit down in front of a three letter word like 'bus', they say all the sounds; /b/  /u/   /s/  and then tell you that the word is dad.  Aghhhh.....you think 'what happened'?  They said all the right sounds why can't they read the word? 

The ability to blend sounds to build words from individual sounds in sequence can be tricky at first.  Your child has not figured out how to smoothly connect the sounds.  Here are a few strategies you can try at home. 

• You tell your child that you are going to tell them a word that will sound a bit strange and you want them to guess what the word is.  You say to your child guess this word; /s/ /u/ /n/. What word is that.  If your child doesn't get it right away, hold onto the sounds you can and really exaggerate the word.  You can also give them a few picture clues at a time. 

Watch:
Word Play

• Point to the letters as your child reads the word and have them hold onto the sounds until you move your finger.  Now some sounds cannot or should not be held (b,c, d, g, h, j, k, p, q, t, w, x)  If these sounds are held your child will begin to place a vowel sound after if like (buh).  

• Talk about word families.  Have your child practice reading common chunks found in words like -ap, an, in, at, am, op, un. Make word slides to help them practice reading words fluently with word chunks.  The best part is that all of these words rhyme making the endings sound the same! 

I made one out of paint chips for my kiddos at home.  They loved the colors! Best part it was free and easy.