Phonemic Awareness: Word Play

It's Summer 2024 and no better time to slide into Summer Learning. In this post you'll discover simple phonemic awareness  games, many of which require no extra materials, that you can play at home or on that road trip. 

Rhyming Puzzle Game

1. Rhyming Cards:

Materials: Cards with pictures/ pictures & words, calling cards.

How to Play: Call out a word, and the children find a picture on their card that rhymes with the word.

2. Sound Matching:

 Materials: A set of picture cards.

How to Play: Spread out the cards. Children take turns picking two cards that start with the same sound.

3. Syllable Clapping:

Materials: None needed.

How to Play: Say a word and have the children clap the number of syllables. For example, "banana" would get three claps.

4. Phoneme Substitution:

Material: None needed.

How to Play: Say a word and then ask the child to change one sound to make a new word. For example, "cat" to "bat" (changing /c/ to /b/).

5. I Spy with Phonemes:

Materials: None needed.

How to Play: Say "I spy with my little eye something that starts with /s/." The child then looks around and guesses objects that start with that sound.

6. Phoneme Blending:

Materials: None needed.

How to Play: Slowly say the sounds of a word separately (e.g., /c/ /a/ /t/) and have the children blend the sounds together to say the word.

7. Silly Sentences:

Materials: None needed.

How to Play: Create silly sentences where all the words start with the same sound, like "Silly Sammy swiftly sang songs."

8. Jump to the Sound:

Materials: None needed.

How to Play: Say a word and have the children jump forward for each sound they hear in the word. For example, for the word "dog," they would jump three times (/d/ /o/ /g/).

Take Away

These activities can be played inside or in the great outdoors. The goal is to make it fun while being engaging and educational, helping young children develop these foundational phonemic awareness skills.