Step 1

Review previous concepts

Review and warm-up drills

Visual drills

Use grapheme letter cards with known graphemes and ask the student to identify all the sounds they know that grapheme can make (e.g., ‘C’ = /k/, /s/). Move quickly through these!  

Watch this video of a teacher candidate leading a student through a visual drill with grapheme cards.

Auditory drill

Say/Dictate letter sounds and ask the student to write the corresponding graphemes (e.g., /k/ = ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ck’) 

Watch this video of a teacher candidate leading a student through an auditory drill.

Blending drill

Use grapheme cards with known graphemes. Organize by initial, medial and final sounds. Guide student(s) in saying each sound and then blending the three sounds into a word (or pseudoword).

  • Make new words by changing one letter or grapheme at a time.
  • Continue the process to make more new words, alternating between changing the initial, medial, and final positions.
Watch this video of a teacher candidate leading a student through a blending drill with grapheme cards.

Phonological and phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. It’s very important for learning to read, especially learning to blend and segment individual sounds in words. 

Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that includes phonemic awareness and also skills such as the ability to recognize parts of spoken words like rhymes, syllables, and alliteration.

Use these activities to help your student build phonemic and phonological awareness skills.

Do some oral blending and segmenting with words that include the new concept you are teaching.

For example, for UFLI Lesson 41c, have your student blend and segment some short vowel words.

Blend

Turtle talk to motor mouth – You will orally segment one word into its individual phonemes (stretch it out in “turtle talk”) and the student will blend them to make the word (“motor mouth”).

Eg. /s/ /l/ /o/ /p/ – “slop”

Segment

Motor mouth to turtle talk. You will say a word and the student will orally segment that word into individual phonemes.

Eg. “List” – /l/ /i/ /s/ /t/

Additional phonemic awareness activities

Kilpatrick’s Phonemic Awareness Lessons

Use Kilpatrick’s One Minute Exercises (not using the new phonics concept) to help students orally manipulate phonemes in words. Begin with Level J. Your student should be able to move through one single section (e.g., Level J #3) in 60 seconds with almost no errors. If they can, move on to a more challenging level next time. 

Kilpatrick One Minute Exercises include more challenging phonemic awareness skills.

Watch this video of a teacher candidate leading a child through a Kilpatrick One Minute Exercise for phonemic awareness.

Phonological and phonemic awareness tips

Follow this link to a Google Doc that includes activities to enrich Phonemic Awareness.

Play some of the 2Fun4Words games from the Lit Kit to build phonemic awareness.

Step 2

Introduce new concept