Notes from Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom
Shift 2: Recommitting to Phonemic Awareness Instruction
Recommendations for making the shift
What does phonemic awareness Instruction require?
1. Instructional routines
- -Articulatory gestures
- -Blending
- -Segmentation
- -Isolation and discrimination
- -Deletion
- -Substitution
- -Word lists
2. Multisensory Scaffolds
Because phonemic awareness is abstract metalinguistic (manipulating abstract sounds), use a multisensory and interactive scaffolds
- -Elkonin boxes
3. Assessment Plan
Using Articulatory Gestures:
Thinking about where a phoneme is made in the mouth, or placement of articulation, can help children distinguish and remember the sound.
| P b m | Putting our lips together |
| F v | Putting our top teeth against our bottom lip |
| th | Putting our tongue between our teeth |
| T d n s z l | Pressing our tongue to the roof of our mouths, just behind the teeth |
| J sh ch | Pressing our tongue on the roof of the mouth, back a bit |
| A h | Opening our throat and mouth |
| K g ng | Pressing our tongue on the roof of the mouth at the back |
Continuous sounds are sounds that are held as long as we can.
Stop sounds are sounds made with a single puff of air.
Phonemic Awareness Teaching Tips
Have children place their hands on their vocal chords to feel which phonemes are voiced, and unvoiced.
Sound sorts with picture cards: Display and say the name of key cards, then have students identify the sounds in each.
Elkonin boxes: Make the abstract work of phoneme manipulation visual and multisensory
Use counters or bingo chips to slide into each square that represents a sound in a word.
Phonemic Awareness Teaching DON’Ts
1. Using letters and sounds interchangeably
Instead of:
- -Listen to the letters in pin -> Listen to the sounds in pin
- -What letter do you hear at the beginning of pin? -> What sound do you hear at the beginning of pin?
- -How many letters do you hear in the word pin? -> How many sounds do you hear in the word pin?
2. Not being intentional about clean pronunciation of every phoneme
Stop sounds like p/b can become buh or puh.
Tip: Before making the sound, exhale, then think ‘quick and quiet’ as you produce the phoneme to avoid the extra vowel
