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Skill Explainer

Phoneme Manipulation Skill Explainer

Erin Kosteva, M.Ed.

1. An Overview of Phoneme Manipulation

Why Do We Teach Phoneme Manipulation?

Video thumbnail for Quick Look: Phonemic Awareness Practice With Sound Substitutions
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Ashley Powell: We are going to practice listening for individual sounds in words. Okay? And we are going to use each one of these squares to represent each sound and every word. So, listen to me tap out the sounds in the word big. What's my word?

Students: Big.

Ashley Powell: So, I've got the word big. /b/, /ĭ/,/g/. Big. My first, sound, /b/, my middle, /ĭ/, last sound, /g/. Sound good? Each one represents its own sound. Okay. So now we're going to practice changing some of these sounds in our word. Okay? If I want to change wig to fig, what do I want to change? Zanaya?

Zanaya: I want to change /w/ ...

Ashley Powell: Good ...

Zanaya: ... to /f/.

Ashley Powell: All right, let's do that. Change /w/ to /f/. Okay? Are we ready to tap?

Ms. Powell and students: /f/, ĭ/,/g/, fig.

Ashley Powell: Good job.

When you teach phoneme manipulation, you will use manipulatives such as felt squares instead of letters to represent individual phonemes. We don’t want our students to be distracted by printed letters and words right now.

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