2.1 Practice Your Phoneme Awareness Skills

Now it’s your turn to practice segmenting and blending phonemes. You may want to do this activity with a partner so you can listen to and help each other! 

Practice with Phonemes

1. Segmenting. 

Say the sounds in thought.

Listen and tap the phonemes.

2. Segmenting. 

Tell me the sounds in fox.

Listen and tap the phonemes.

3. Segmenting. 

Tell me the sounds in key.

Listen and tap the phonemes.

4. Blending.

Listen to these sounds:

/y/, /o͞o/, /th/

Blend them together. 

What's the word?

5. Addition

What phoneme do you need to add to the end of the word scrunch to create the word scrunched? 

What’s the sound? /t/

6. Deletion

Let's think of the word coil. What do you get if you remove the /k/ sound from coil?

What’s our word?

7. Substitution

Say toy. 

Say it again but change the /t/ to /b/. 

What’s our word?

8. Reversal

The word is pit. 

Reverse the beginning and ending sounds. What word do you get? 

What’s our word?

Grab a pencil and continue to practice your phoneme skills offline, with a friend or independently, with the hands-on activities in the printable handout below.

Phoneme Practice for Paraprofessionals

Download Activities

On the next page, you’ll complete a quick knowledge check on your phonemic awareness skills to make sure you have what you need to teach!