Teaching Strategy Demo: Head, Waist, and Knees

Dr. Deb Glaser: Okay. This is one of my favorite phoneme segmentation activities. It helps students hear the middle sound of words by tapping their head, waist, and knees. So when children are first beginning to segment the sounds in words, start with a three sound word, like bike or cup, and tap your head for the beginning sound, your waist for the middle sound, and then your knees for the end sound. This activity gets kids up and moving around, which for most of our students, that's a really positive thing. For example, now let's try it together. Let's separate the phonemes in the word moose. Word? Moose. What are the sounds? /m/, /o͞o/, /s/. What's that middle sound? /o͞o/. Right. This is an activity that can be done with your phonics words, so it helps you focus on the phoneme first for the words the students will be reading. Let's try another /o͞o/ word, moon. What's the word? Moon. It was a full moon last night. What are the sounds in moon? /m/, /o͞o/, /n/. What's that middle sound in moon? /o͞o/. Right. That's the sound we're going to be working on this week. /o͞o/.

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Dr. Deb Glaser: This is Reading Universe.