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! 

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!