How to Improve a Child's Phonological Awareness Skills

Early Childhood Activities

• 1

  Read, read, read to your child from infancy on.

• 2

  Sing and chant nursery rhymes, tongue twisters and simple songs together as often as possible.

• 3

  Teach what a rhyme is and encourage your child to try to make up his/her own. About the age of three, kids can begin to understand rhyming and make up their own rhymes. This prepares your child to deal with onsets and rimes.

• 4

  Emphasize what sounds letters make. As your child gets more comfortable identifying letters, talk about the name of a letter and also the sound it makes. This prepares your child to deal with phonemes.

• 5

  Clap the syllables to familiar words. Teach your child to make one clap per syllable.

• 6

  Practice sentence segmentation. Have your child count how many words are in a sentence.

Activities For Once School Starts

• 7

  Stretch out words when writing. To help your child recognize individual phonemes, say each phoneme as you write a word for them or while s/he writes his/her name.

• 8

  Play word games. These can be great activities in the car or at the dinner table. Counting the sounds (phonemes) in a word, identifying the beginning sounds of a three letter word (move onto ending and then middle sounds of three letter words as your child improves), changing the beginning sound of word (rhyming), naming the things in a room that start with a particular letter or sound and clapping out the syllables of longer words.

• 9

  Play "Guess the Word". Say a word very slowly, first stretching out the rime and onset, such as " /d/ . . ./og/" and have your child guess what word you are saying. Start with shorter words and work up to longer ones. After your child seems comfortable with blending onsets and rimes, begin stretching out words by individual phoneme, " /d/ . . . /o/ . . ./g/". Start with shorter words and work up to longer ones.

• 10

  Encourage your child to manipulate the sounds in words by adding a phoneme (what's let plus /er/?), deleting a phoneme (what's scat take away /s/?) or substituting a phoneme (if you take /b/ from bat and put in /s/, what word do you get?).