ALEX Learning Activity

The purpose of this “before” activity is to provide practice opportunities for students to manipulate phonemes through substitutions of initial, medial, and final sounds. This activity supports students in building their articulation and distinguishing between the initial, medial, and final sounds in words. Advanced Phonemic Awareness Skills (Google Slides) allows students to warm up their thinking processes and practice hearing, seeing, and manipulating letters to recognize patterns and repetition in language. This is a great way to support their phonological and phonemic awareness skills. 

This resource was created in partnership with Dothan City Schools.

Once this "before" activity is complete, students will be able to manipulate phonemes using substitutions, additions, and deletions, and manipulate initial, medial, and final phonemes in spoken words.

Students will use knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences to encode words accurately. 

To begin the activity review the substitution, deletion, and addition hand motion videos (provided in the slide show).

The teacher will lead students in practicing the advanced phonemic awareness skills of substitution, addition, and deletion using the examples provided in the Advanced Phonemic Awareness Skills Slide Show. The teacher will model the skills using the "I do, We do, You do" method.

The students will respond whole group using hand motions with words requiring substitutions, deletions, and additions in the initial, medial, or final positions of a word. 

Pass out dry-erase boards, markers, and erasers. Using the examples in the slideshow, ask students to "say" the original word,  then complete the hand motions for that word. Then ask students to write the word on their dry-erase board. Then have them make the change to the word as directed in the slide show.                                 

***Note: This is a great way to monitor their understanding of each skill. Continue through the slide show working on each word using hand motions and asking students to write the words after each hand motion. 

The teacher should evaluate student progress during the whole group activities to ensure that students demonstrate the required advanced phonemic awareness skills and that students encode the words accurately. 

Review practice questions in small groups or with individual students to assess student skills with substituting, adding, and deleting phonemes.

Examples of practice questions: 

Addition-Say bell. Now say bell, but add /t/ to the end of bell. (belt)

Deletion: Say fin. Now say fin, but don't say /f/. (in)

Substitution: Say strap. Now say strap, but change /a/ to /i/.  (strip)

1. Be sure you have adequate access to the Substitutions, Deletions, and Additions Videos and Advanced Phonemic Awareness Skills (Google Slides). Review the videos and practice the motions prior to teaching the activity.

2. Collect dry-erase boards, erasers, and markers for each student and pass them out to the group prior to beginning the activity.

Acceleration: Ask gifted students to make lists of words with four or five letters and replace the initial, medial, and final sounds.

Intervention: Tier 2 intervention can be provided by printing the CVC words from the slides and having students use letter tiles to conduct the substitutions, deletions, and/or additions in a small group with other students struggling to master phonemes and graphemes.