How to Plan a Phonemic Awareness Lesson
There are many high quality, standalone phonological / phonemic awareness programs and informative books to support instruction (e.g. ECRI, Heggerty, Phonemic Awareness in Young Children (Marilyn Adam’s), Equipped for Reading Success (David Kilpatrick) etc.
There are also many high quality, whole class reading programs that include phonemic awareness instruction.
These programs significantly reduce teacher workload, but it is essential that they are informed by current research and include a detailed scope and sequence.
A phonemic awareness lesson plan typically focuses on activities that help students identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) within words, often including activities like sound isolation, blending sounds to form words, segmenting words into individual sounds, and substituting sounds to create new words.
Depending on the intended purpose, and students’ level of development, the lesson would usually starts with a review of basic sounds and then progress to more complex manipulations. Lessons should always be informed by the student data that you have collected.
A targeted phonemic awareness lesson for intervention purposes, can be quickly created if one has collected evidence about the student area of need (deficit), targets the specific skill/s required for development (e.g. blending/ segmenting), and supports the transference of skills to encoding and decoding by the use of decodable texts and inclusion of skill application when spelling.
Example of a Basic Lesson Plan Structure:
Objective: Students will be able to identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) within words by isolating initial, medial, and final sounds, blending sounds to form words, and segmenting words into individual sounds.
Materials:
- Whiteboard or smartboard
- Markers, magnetic dots
- Picture cards with clear beginning, middle, and ending sounds (e.g., cat, dog, sun)
- Sound cards with individual phonemes (optional)
- Elkonin boxes (optional)
Lesson Sequence (examples):
Review and Warm-up:
Sound Review: Quickly review a previously learnt phonemes, asking students to say the sound when a picture card is shown. (If working at a more complex level, where letters have been introduced, picture & letter cards can be used. The inclusion of the letter/ sound (phoneme/grapheme) application moves the lesson to a phonics focus, whereby the neural pathways between the phonological processor and orthographic processer are made).
Rhyming Game: Play a quick rhyming game, asking students to identify words that rhyme with a given word.
Focused Phonemic Awareness Skill:
Sound Isolation: Show a picture card and ask students to identify the beginning sound (e.g., “What is the first sound you hear in ‘cat’?”) Repeat with different pictures, focusing on middle and ending sounds.
Blending: Say individual phoneme slowly, articulating the phoneme clearly, and ask students to blend them together to form a word (e.g., ” /c/ /a/ /t/ – the word is?”), Quickly provide corrective feedback of sound articulation.
Segmentation: Say a word and ask students to break it into individual sounds, using fingers or Elkonin boxes to represent each sound (e.g., “Say ‘dog’! The sounds in ‘dog’ are? Children respond /d/ /o/ /g/”). Quickly provide corrective feedback of sound articulation.
Practice application of skill:
“I Spy” Sound Game: Select specific sound and have students “spy” objects in the classroom that start with that sound.
Sound Swap (Substitution): Say a word and ask students to substitute one sound to create a new word (e.g., “Say ‘cat’ but change the ‘c’ sound to ‘b’ – what word do you have now?”) The inclusion of letters and mini whiteboards would move the lesson to a phonic focus, supporting the grapho-phonic connection.
Application Activity:
Read Aloud with Sound Focus: Read a simple story aloud, pausing occasionally to ask students to identify specific sounds in words from the text.
Decodable text– practice reading text with matching phonic code (word lists/phrases /simple sentences/ short decodable book)
Word Building Game: Provide students with sound cards and ask them to build words by placing the cards in order to form a word. (Phonic application)
Practice writing words (encoding), simple sentences using matching code and previously learnt code.
Differentiation:
For struggling students: Provide more visual cues and scaffolding (i.e. Elkonin boxes and markers), use cvc words, provide additional practice with basic sound isolation and blending. Work at an ‘I do/ we do ‘level to build confidence before independent application, ’You do’.
For more advanced students: Introduce more complex sound manipulation activities like deletion and substitution, and challenge them to identify sounds in longer/ multisyllabic words.
Monitoring Progress:
- Observation – observe student participation and accuracy during activities.
- Application – ask students to complete a quick activity to assess their ability to isolate, blend, and segment sounds.
Further information regarding the use and purpose of Universal Screeners and Diagnostic Assessments will be covered later in the course.
Important Considerations:
- Lesson should be structured, cumulative and explicit.
- Follow a detailed scope and sequence
- Explicitly teach skills to students.
- Include gradually release of instruction strategies in lessons i.e. ‘I do,’ ‘we do’, ‘you do’.
- Include a ‘daily review’ to provide repeated exposure and practice. This provides students with the opportunity to shift newly acquired information into long term memory, for immediate and effortless retrieval.
- Keep lessons short and engaging: Use a variety of activities and resources to maintain student interest.
- Focus on auditory processing i.e. listening skills and clear sound pronunciation.
- Connect phonemic awareness to phonics: Gradually introduce letter-sound correspondences as students develop phonemic awareness skills. Use a Structured Synthetic Phonics Program SSP.
- Connect handwriting lessons to PA and Phonics.
- Use universal skill/ strategies and pedagogies across the school as to reduce cognitive load.