Teaching Strategy Demo: Pull the Sounds Out of Your Mouth

Dr. Deborah Glaser: When we speak, the words come out of our mouth. So this activity, pulling the phonemes out of your mouth, makes a lot of sense to children.

To help students segment the words into phonemes, let's pretend we're pulling those sounds out of our mouths. Starting at your lips pretend to grasp each isolated sound as you move your thumb and forefinger in a pulling movement away from your mouth.

Let's try to separate the sounds of the word left by pulling the phonemes out of your mouth.

The word is left. What word? Left. This is my left hand. What are the sounds in left? Pull those sounds out. /l/, /ĕ/, /f/, /t/. What's my word? Left.

Now let's try it with another word that shares a very similar consonant combination as left. The word is soft.

What's the word? Soft. My pet is very soft.

Pull those sounds out. /s/, /ŏ/, /f/, /t/.

Put it all together. What's the word? Soft. Great.

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Dr. Deborah Glaser: This is Reading Universe.