Happy #phonologicalfriday everyone! Happy Valentine’s Day too!
This week we are going to continue with ideas for promoting phonological awareness with your students.
Before discussing the lesson, we first should review a few concepts to make sure we are all on the same page with the terminology.
If you have been following #phonologicalfriday since the beginning, you may remember the Phonological Tower.
The Phonological Tower represents the stages of awareness an individual must gain in order to become a skilled reader. Word awareness is the easiest level at the bottom of the tower, and the top of the tower that represents the phoneme or phonemic awareness is the hardest level.
Onset-Rime awareness is the third level students must reach before they can be considered to be fully phonologically aware.
The onset of a word or syllable is the consonant or consonant cluster that occurs before the vowel in a word or syllable. In the following words, there is a dash between the onset and the rime (This is not a typo, in education, the rime refers to the vowel and final consonants in a syllable. When speaking about both it refers to onset-rime awareness).
Examples:
hat -> h-at
thing -> th-ing
black -> bl-ack
The activity below is great for younger students, even before formal reading instruction has begun. It is also useful for those who students who still struggle with onset awareness.
Grab the Odd One Out
The object of this lesson is for students to identify which one of the three words doesn’t belong or starts with a different sound.
For this lesson, you will need to have a list of sets of three words that you will use during the lesson (hen, hammer, pencil), objects to represent the ‘odd word out’, and a bag or container to hold the objects that represent the ‘odd word out’.
With your students sitting at a table or carpet, explain to them that you have a grab bag filled with objects. Tell them that you will be saying three words and they are to decide which of the words does not fit. If you are teaching this to a group of students, ask them to raise their hands when they know the answer and not call it out.
You will select a student and ask them to reach into the bag and without looking, feel around to try and find the ‘odd word out’ in the bag. When they find the object, they say the word and show the object to everyone else.
Some Tips
When creating your word lists, I find it helpful to think of what you already have to be the objects you will use for the ‘odd word out’. This way you won’t be scrambling to try and find the objects the night before your lesson.
You may also want to try and use the ‘odd word out’ as part of the matching words for another list of words. This is helpful for once the students begin getting better at the activity.
For example, you could do the following:
hen, hammer, pencil
pencil, pie, car
car, crayon, hen
Extension Activities
After the student pulls the object out of the bag, you can ask them to think of a word that has the same first sound as the object.
This activity could be extended as students’ onset awareness increases. The next step up would be having students to identify words that rhyme or have the same final consonant sound (rime awareness).
Be sure to check out more graphics for these morphemes on our Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter pages.
If there is anything we can do or post to help you learn more about the importance of morphological awareness (or any other topic for that matter) please send an email to blog@garfortheducation.com
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