Phonological awareness

Definition
- Phonological awareness covers basic awareness of speech
sounds (knowledge that sounds make up onset-rimes,
onset-rimes make up syllables, syllables make up words)
and the advanced skills such as manipulation
(substituting,deleting, reversing) of words.
# The ability to identify and manipulate units of oral language-
parts of words, syllables, onset & rhymes
 Rhyme

Rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words.

Examples:
Cat - hat
Head - bed
Oak - poke
 Activity 1 - Odd Word Out

- Let the students know that they will be listening for the “odd word out” in groups of
words that rhyme (e.g. man, can, fan, pan, book).
- For students struggling with this task, provide word cards that they can look at for
support.
- For students excelling at this task, ask them to generate two new rhyming words for
the odd word out (e.g. look & cook).
Activity 2 - Rhyming Riddles
● Come up with simple riddles or poems and go over them with the students.
● Next, let the students fill in the rhyming word after you start the riddles or
poem.
Example :
- “The black cat is very ____ (fat)” or “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
- “Humpty Dumpty had a big ____ (fall)”.

● Finding a word that rhymes is challenging for students, repeat the riddle or
poem and give the first sound of the rhyme (e.g. “The black cat is very f___”.)
Activity 3 - I Spy Play

- Use items around the room that rhyme (e.g. “I spy something that rhymes
with four…” “door!”).
- If students are doing well at this game, ask them to take a turn spying a
rhyming object.
- Allow students to use made up words during their turns (e.g. “I spy
something that rhymes with lacket”… “Jacket!”).
- It is alright for children to make up non-words that rhyme since their
vocabularies are still developing and they are correctly completing the
phonological awareness task regardless.
- Example:
Activity 4 - Scavenger hunt
- Create a list of pairs of rhyming words where at least one of the words is a concrete
noun (e.g. ball-fall, hat-bat, sock-rock).
- Hide objects or pictures that correspond to one of the words in the rhyming pair
around the classroom (i.e. hide a [picture of a] ball, hat, and sock).
- You may split the students into teams or groups.
- Tell the students they will listen to you say a word and will then have to find an
object or picture that rhymes with that word and then read out one word at a time or
one word for each group.
Alliteration
Alliteration is the identification and production of words that begin with same
initial sound.
Sally buys a pack of salt.
Activity: tongue twister
Activity
Based on the picture: Let the pupils identify which picture starts with the same initial.
Word and syllable segmenting
● Segmenting words into sounds (phoneme segmentation) means breaking apart
words into their phonemes for example: graph /g/ /r/ /a/ /f/.
● A child must be able to recognize onset - phoneme(s) before vowel; and rime - the
rest of the phoneme(s) of the words. For example:
○ down vs. brown
■ d = onset
■ br = onset
■ own = rime
● Syllable segmenting is the ability to identify how many syllables there are in a
word (required sound awareness)
● A child that is able to recognise the syllables of a word will be able to read and spell
better.
 For example, the given word is “blow”
Activity: Clap Your Hands
1. In this activity, the child need to identify theFor
(onset-
word segmenting:
rimes/syllables) of the given words.
● To separate the onset-rimes, they
2. The child need to clap based on the sounds (onset- should clap /bl/ and /ow/.
rimes/syllables) they hear. ● But in terms of sounds, they should
claps three times because it has 3
sounds (phonemes).

For syllable segmenting:

● They should clap once only because
the word is 1 syllable word.
 Activity: Syllables Puzzle
1. Put the pictures in a bowl and let the
children take one each.

2. Spread out the puzzle of syllables on

the desk or floor.

3. Let them find the syllables to form a

complete word for the picture they get.

4. The child can take another picture and

form the word.

5. The child with the most correct words

is the winner.
Onset and rime
1. The "onset" is the initial phonological unit of any word (e.g. c in cat) and
the term "rime" refers to the string of letters that follow, usually a vowel and
final consonants (e.g. at in cat).
Onset and rime
Activity
1. Using letter blocks, swap the initial letter of the words. For example, create two
words:
Mango and kiwi
2. Then swap the initial letter. Kango and miwi.

3. Let the young learners to arrange the block to create the correct words.