Activities to develop phonological awareness

Spoken words are made up of speech sounds, and written words are made up of letters. When learning to read and write, children need to be able to understand the link between speech sounds and the alphabet.

 

Phonological awareness skills help children to learn how sounds and letters go together in words. For example, knowing that the sound “sss” can be represented by the letter ‘s’. They allow children to be able to segment, blend, and de-code words. These skills are essential for children to develop their reading and writing skills.

Rhyming Games
Once your child is confident in being able to hear rhymes, try making up your own silly rhymes together and see how many rhymes you can do, for instance “cat hat fat mat bat…”.

 

Play “I went on holiday…” thinking of words that start with one sound, for instance if the sound is ‘b’, you could pack a ‘bin’ ‘bed’ ‘box’ and so on. If your child learns best with more concrete learning experiences, you could play this game with a real bag or suitcase and collect a range of objects beginning with different sounds. Start the game by packing the first item, for example some beads, in the suitcase, and say that you need to pack all the things that start with the same sound as ‘beads’ – such as book, banana, ball, bag.

 

Have 3 pictures or objects and encourage your child to decide which one is the odd one out. For example, for sun, sock and cat, the odd one out would be ‘cat’ because it starts with a /k/ sound.

 

Play a describing game where you give clues about the words. For example, for ‘cat’ you could say “I am an animal. I have 4 legs. I am furry. I have whiskers. The first sound of my name is /k/. What am I?”.

 

Take turns to choose or write a letter, and then say as many words as you can think of starting with that letter.