Phonemic Awareness Practice: How to Supplement Your Curriculum

You completed your phonemic-awareness lesson, but a few students are still struggling with the target skill. Tomorrow, your curriculum moves on. What should you do? You do not necessarily need to repeat the entire lesson or look for a different curriculum. Those students may simply need more examples and a few extra minutes of targeted phonemic awareness practice. 

A curriculum provides an important instructional sequence, but students do not all master each skill at the same pace. The key is to identify exactly what students need and provide additional practice without disrupting the routine you already have in place.

Start With the Exact Skill

“Needs help with phonemic awareness” is too broad to guide your next step. Narrow the need as much as possible.

For example, does the student need practice with:

• Three-phoneme or four-phoneme blending?

• Initial, medial, or final phoneme isolation?

• Segmenting words with blends?

• Initial-phoneme deletion?

• Medial-phoneme substitution?

The more specific you can be, the easier it is to provide useful practice.

If you need a refresher on how the skills fit together, start with my post about the difference between phonological and phonemic awareness.

Assessment results can help you identify possible gaps, but your observations during daily lessons are important too. Notice where students hesitate, respond incorrectly, or rely heavily on the other students in the group.

You can learn more about using screening results to create groups and plan instruction in my post about assessing phonemic awareness and using the data.

Keep the Routine Familiar

Students do not always need a completely different activity when they struggle with a skill. Often, it helps to keep the familiar oral routine while adjusting the practice.

You might change:

• The word examples

• The sound position

• The number of phonemes

• The complexity of the words

• The number of repetitions

• The students receiving the practice

This keeps the focus on the skill rather than on asking students to learn a new game or set of directions.

Add Five Minutes of Phonemic Awareness Practice

Once you know the target, look for a short place in your day to provide additional practice.

You could use it:

• Immediately after the daily lesson

• As a small-group warm-up

• Before phonics instruction

• During intervention or reteaching

• While waiting for lunch, recess, or dismissal

• With an educational assistant, paraprofessional, volunteer, tutor, or parent

You do not need to create another lengthy lesson. Five focused minutes can give you valuable information about whether students are beginning to understand the skill.

I share additional ideas for using those small pockets of time in 5 Meaningful Ways to Fill 5 Minutes in the Classroom.

What Does Targeted Practice Look Like?

Imagine that your daily lesson includes phoneme deletion. Most students respond correctly, but four students consistently remove the wrong sound.

Instead of repeating the complete lesson with the entire class, meet briefly with those four students. If they are struggling specifically with deleting the initial phoneme, practice only that skill using a fresh set of examples.

Another group might need to continue blending three-phoneme words while the rest of the class is ready to blend four-phoneme words. Both groups are working on phoneme blending, but the level of practice is different.

This is why identifying the precise target matters.

Would you like to try this targeted approach with your students? You can grab a free set of phonemic-awareness word lists here.

Stop Searching for the Right Words

Knowing the target skill is one part of the process. Finding enough appropriate word examples is often the part that takes extra planning time.

I created my phonological and phonemic awareness word-list cards so I could quickly pull the practice students needed.

The resource includes more than 250 ready-to-use cards organized into 10 skill areas. Within those areas, the cards separate practice by subskill, sound position, word type, or level of complexity.

Each word-list card includes:

• The target skill

• Clear teacher directions

• Word examples

• Expected student responses

The cards can be printed, cut, and organized by skill on rings. When students need additional practice, choose the matching card and begin.

If you are ready to stop creating word lists from scratch, you can see the complete collection of 250+ phonological and phonemic awareness cards here.

Keep Your Curriculum and Target the Gaps

Your phonemic-awareness curriculum provides the instructional sequence. Assessment results and daily observations help you identify the students who need more. Targeted word-list cards make it easier to provide that additional practice.

The process can be simple:

1. Identify the exact skill.

2. Choose a matching word list.

3. Provide five minutes of focused practice.

Choose the skill. Grab the list. Teach in 5 minutes.