Strategies, Practices and Tools
Decades of research provides a clear understanding of how skilled reading develops and how to most effectively support children in learning to read proficiently. Evidence-based, structured literacy instruction develops all the foundational language and literacy skills that must be woven together so that children can make meaning from the words they read.
The information presented here is intended to complement evidence-based core reading curricula and intervention programs already in place and help educators fill in gaps or modify their approaches with effective strategies, instructional practices, and tools and activities to implement them.
Early childhood educators can focus their practices to help children build language and emergent literacy skills. Pre-K and K-3 educators can find evidence-based ways to provide explicit, implicit, and incidental instruction across the essential components of literacy. And English Language Arts teachers across grades 4-12 will find effective practices to help students meet the increasing need for skilled reading.
Instructional Strategy
Provide students with explicit instruction and practice opportunities to identify and play with or manipulate individual sounds in spoken words and link phonemes to letters once students move can perceive phonemes in single syllable words.
Students must be able to segment and blend phonemes in words. These are foundational skills for grasping the alphabetic principle.
Phonemic awareness is a sub-component of phonological awareness. The three levels of phonological awareness development are:
- Early: segmenting and blending syllables
- Basic: segmenting and blending initial and individual sounds/phonemes (phonemic awareness)
- Advanced/Complex: manipulation tasks like adding and deleting (also phonemic awareness).
Phonemic awareness knowledge is a predictor skill for successful reading and writing in first and second grades.
Effective Practices
- Keep instruction and practice engaging and fun
- Use concrete objects (bingo chips) to represent sounds when students are manipulating and teach students how to use those
- Teach students to tap out phonemes in words
- Use motions or gestures when playing with individual sounds in words
- Teach students phoneme deletion and substitution
- Teach students phonemes in single syllable words
- Teach students consonant blends and digraphs
- Carefully select words for instruction
- Link phonemes to letters during phonemic awareness instruction ONCE students can perceive phonemes by ear alone
- Teach sounds with letters 5-18 hours.
- Use word-building and other activities to link students’ knowledge of letter–sound relationships with phonemic awareness
- Kindergarten
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- Teach students to recognize and manipulate segments of sound in speech. by following the developmental progression (basic phonological awareness stage):
- Identify and match the initial sound in words.
- Blend the initial sound with the rest of the word.
- Blend individual phonemes into words and segment individual phonemes within words.
- Teach students to break single syllable CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words into smaller units by demonstrating how to isolate individual sounds in words and segment words into individual sounds with explicit instruction and scaffolded practice.
- Teach students letter-sound relations.
- Teach students to recognize and manipulate segments of sound in speech. by following the developmental progression (basic phonological awareness stage):
- Grade 1
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- Teach students to recognize and manipulate segments of sound in speech by following the developmental progression (basic phonological awareness stage).
- Syllable deletion.
- Blend two or more phonemes.
- Segment phonemes in words with no blends (cap) first and then words with blends (clap).
- Phoneme substitution to build new words (change the /p/ in “peg” to /l/.
- Teach students letter-sound relations.
- Teach students to recognize and manipulate segments of sound in speech by following the developmental progression (basic phonological awareness stage).
- Grade 2
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- Demonstrate how to manipulate individual sounds in words with explicit instruction and scaffolded practice.
- Teach students phoneme manipulation skills (deletion, substitution, and reversal) and require students to be able to isolate, segment, and blend phonemes.
- Begin with deletion tasks for initial and final positions (Say “meat” without the /m/).
- For substituting phonemes, also begin with initial and final positions (Change the /m/ in “mad” to /s/).
- For reversing phonemes, (Say “tap” now say it backward “pat”).
- Grade 3
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- Spend 10-15 minutes per day.
- Demonstrate how to manipulate individual sounds in words with explicit instruction and scaffolded practice.
- Follow the same development progression as 2nd grade, adding the medial sounds or consonant blends in words.
Tools and Activities
Phonemic Awareness: Segmentation
Instructional routines for teaching students to segment words into individual phonemes (sounds).
Download from National Center on Intensive Intervention
Download from Florida Center for Reading Research
Learn More from Reading Universe (segmentation and blending)
Phoneme Manipulation/Sound Changes
Sample instructional routine and materials for manipulating sounds in words.
Download from Florida Center for Reading Research
Identifying and Linking Segments of Sound and Letters
Recommendations and activities for building and dividing compound words, advanced word-building, and using Elkonin sound boxes.
Learn More from What Works Clearinghouse
Related
Developmental benchmarks and literacy behaviors that most children display at a particular age/grade.
Evidence-based reading interventions support students who are identified as struggling with specific foundational literacy skills.
Evidence-based core curricula, interventions, and supplemental programs play a critical role in supporting students’ reading success.
While seemingly effortless, good reading is made up of a set of complex skills and strategies.