3.1 Choose Level-Appropriate Words

Phoneme awareness develops in a sequence, beginning with the sounds of simple words — like up, bat, and top — that have a single short vowel and just one or two consonants.

Let's look at how words can move from simple to complex: 

As students make progress, they can identify and work with the sounds of more complex words — like sprout, lamp, and branch — that have a variety of consonants and vowels.

You may notice that students typically are able to isolate and identify the beginning and ending sounds of a simple word before they are able to identify its middle sound. 

Here are 8 tips for choosing words to practice phonemes with your students: 

1. Single-syllable words with two or three sounds — like be, fan, pick, and shoe — are easiest to work with and may be appropriate for students with limited phoneme awareness.
2. Use words that begin with continuant sounds — like /m/, /s/ and /z/ — for beginning readers: for example, moon, my, mop, so, sun, and zip.
3. If your student can isolate beginning and ending sounds, move to isolating the middle sounds. Choose three-sound words such as cage, back, home, leaf, and fan. Your student is now learning to segment all the sounds in words ... beginning, middle, and end.

4. Be aware! Consonant digraphs — like /th/ and /sh/ — are two letters that represent one sound. Don't let the two letters fool you as you choose your words! Developing readers easily identify these consonant phonemes in three-sound words. Right now they don't know that digraphs have two letters. Use examples like with, shot, and chip to help students practice these sounds.

   

5. Choose words with two or more consonant sounds together (grab, trim) only after students can segment words that don't have these combinations. These are known as "consonant blends" (which is confusing!). A blend is two or more separate consonant phonemes spoken together when pronouncing a word. 

   

6. When choosing words with blends, start with simple beginning two-sound blends — like in blow, crutch, and grace. When students can segment beginning blends, use words with ending blends — like wind, milk, and bent.

   

7. Note that words with vowel diphthongs — like /ow/ and /oy/ — are harder to work with. Words like boil and howl are more appropriate for students who are able to segment all the sounds in three- and four-sound words.

Your lead teacher may be able to tell you about each student’s current phoneme awareness and help you pick appropriate words for your lessons. 

You will also want to consider the words in your school’s reading program. If your school’s reading program does not provide a list of words for teaching phonemes, you and your lead teacher may want to create your own word list similar to Reading Universe’s word list shown below.

You’ll get the hang of choosing words for teaching phoneme awareness by practicing first. Click to the next page to practice and learn.