BUILDING PHONEMIC AWARENESS - SOUND MANIPULATION

Use these helpful CVC Word Cards to help build phonemic awareness skills in deleting and substituting sounds.

We know phonological awareness is a crucial skill set children need to develop in early childhood. It is strongly tied to being able to learn to read and spell successfully.

It is the ability to hear and manipulate sound structures within words.

Phonemic awareness is not to be confused with phonological awareness.

With key focus areas - syllables, rhyme, alliteration, phonemes, that increase in complexity as a child ages, phonemic awareness is a critic part of developing strong phonological awareness skills but it is just one aspect.

WHAT IS PHONEMIC AWARENESS?

Phonemic awareness is what we often associate as teaching and learning phonics. It's the ability to be able to identify individual sounds and how they understand how they work within words. Phonics is the mapping of phonemes or sounds to letters. 

Phonemic awareness includes skills such as hearing initial and final sounds, onset-rime identification as well as being able to blend and segment words and delete and substitute or manipulate sounds.

I've written many posts about the different aspects of phonological awareness (syllables, rhyme, beginning sounds) and phonemic awareness (initial sounds, onset-rime, blending) but have created a resource to practice substituting sounds  - one of the later skills to develop. 

Using simple CVC words, these Change It Up Cards allow children to practice identifying initial, medial and final sounds as well as then manipulate one of these targeted sounds to create a new CVC word.

They work simply using pictures as prompts for children to make the first word pictured on the left side of the card then sound out and make the word to match the image on the right hand side of the card mimicking the left-to-right reading direction they are learning at this age.

Each group of cards focuses on either substituting the beginning, middle or final sound to create the new word.

Simple arrows are used to visually support children uncertain about which sound to change.

One arrow = beginning sound cat > hat

Two arrows = middle or medial sound cat >> cut

Three arrows = final sound cat >>> cap

 I haven't included any words on the cards wanting children to use their oral skills to hear what sounds are changing and to allow the cards to be used different ways to meet different needs.

Especially as the first phonemic awareness skills focus on sounds aurally.

These cards can be used with individuals or small groups. Use them for building oral language skills. Paired with magnetic letters to make the words or with whiteboards to write the words.

 I've also included a recording sheet in the download for those wanting to capture their children's learning as they work through the different cards.

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