Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness
Our group explored websites that have emphasis on phonological awareness. There are activities and games that children can do, and teachers and parents can utilize. I hope they are helpful to all of you guys!

1. Readinga-z
www.readinga-z.com/phonics/index.html

The website focuses all on phonological awareness and phonics. This program uses direct and explicit instructional strategies for teaching phonological awareness and phonics. Reading A-Z provides instructional resources for teaching the sounds and symbols of language and their relationships to one another using 30 phonological awareness lessons and 68 phonics lessons. The website is broken down into eight different sections: Phonological Awareness Lessons, Phonological Awareness Assessment, Phonics Lesson, Phonics Assessment, Phonogram Flashcards, Decodable Books, Read-Aloud Books, and Sound/Symbol Books. Each lesson provide teacher and parent many resources they can use with their kids. In the Phonological Awareness lesson children are taught to notice, differentiate, think about and manipulate sounds – from sounds of words to sounds of individual phonemes. Some of the things the lessons focus on are blend syllables; manipulate initial sounds, segment syllables and onset and rime. Phonological Awareness Assessment is where the children listen for, identify, discriminate, and produce sounds. The assessments cover rhyme, onset and rime and syllable awareness. The phonics lessons contain worksheets that focus on consonants, short vowels, and word families, blending of sounds, long vowels, open vowel, vowel digraphs and other vowel patterns. There are two phonics assessments available. One assessment focuses on the child’s ability to associate a sound with a given symbols which covers decoding simple CVC words. The second one focuses on the child’s ability to decode nonsense words which is blending, long vowels, digraphs, and diphthongs. Phonogram flashcards are usefully in teaching word building. The flashcard focuses on the five short vowel sounds. Decoding books can be useful with a child who needs practice decoding the sound/syllables relationships in words that they have already learned. The read-aloud books help children hear a certain sound that they have been working on. Sound/Symbol books let the children read by themselves while they focus on sound/symbol relationships. All of these lessons are great to do with kids who are struggling and kids that are not struggling. The more practice a child receives the better they will understand the sounds of the letters and how the letters work together. There are so many opportunities to practice certain phonics and phonological awareness on this website. It is a great website for parents and teachers who want their children to become better readers.

Evaluated by: Ashley Chumchal


2. Half Pint Kids
www.halfpintkids.com

The website, halfpintkids.com is a wonderful tool for parents or teachers to use with children to help them with their emergent reading and activities for phonemic awareness.
Half Pint Kids has "readers" that a parent or teacher can buy that are fun to read, easy to decode and affordable. The readers were written by a Kindergarten teacher so they are both practical and effective as each word was carefully chosen. The readers are based upon the principles of phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. Half-Pint Readers introduce only a few sounds or new skills at a time while providing lots of opportunities for practice before adding more skills. The books are centered around a theme and each book builds upon the skills of a previous book.
Half Pint Kids also has over 30 different activities that can be done with a child to go along with the readers. Some of the activities prepare the child for reading while others give instructions on how to teach and blend sounds. After the child has mastered the skill, there are games and activities to review and practice that skill.
The downside to this website is that the readers are not free. They are for sale on the website along with several games and activities to reinforce phonemic awareness.
Overall, this website has many great free activities to do with a child to get them started reading. Whether you plan to buy the readers or not, the website offers valuable information, games and activities that would get any child ready to read!

Evaluated by: Callista Young


3. Free-reading
www.freereading.net/index.php?title=Phonological_Awareness_Activities

Freereading.net is a fantastic website with numerous resources and activities for students and teachers particularly dealing with phonological awareness.
There are five tabs including, Core Activities, Educator-Contributed Activities, About Activities, Teaching Tips and Resources.
Under Find Activities there are many resources including- Phonological Awareness, Phonics, Comprehension, Vocabulary, Fluency and Writing.
If you click on Phonological Awareness there are numerous activities for building students phonological awareness, these activities are ordered in skill level, so once your students master the skill you are able to scroll down to a new level. Each activity provides explicit directions and details and some also provide a video of the activity or skill being learned. Some of the activities are identifying and generating rhyming words, body part game, counting words in a sentence and blending syllables name game.
Under educator-contributed activities there are over 70 other different activities for phonological awareness.

Under about the activities there is a complete overview on the importance of phonological awareness, two important manipulation skills are:

• Oral segmenting, which refers to taking spoken language and breaking it into separate parts. Phoneme segmenting, for instance, teaches students that words are composed of sounds, which they need to understand in order for sounding out to make sense.

• Oral blending, which refers to taking a sequence of sounds and putting them together to form spoken language. Phoneme blending is what students will need to do when they sound out words to pronounce them correctly. And information provided by the national reading panel.

The teaching tips tab provides great strategies and explanations on the lessons and activities that are very helpful. And the last tab which is resources provides picture cards that you can download, sound pronunciation guides in mp3 format that provides the recommended way to segment words into onset-rimes and phonemes

Freereading.net is a very useful tool for educators and great learning activities for students. It is also a collaborative website where you can share lessons and ideas!

Evaluated by: Jennifer Porton


4. PBS Spelling Games
http://pbskids.org/games/spelling.html

PBS is a great resource for young children’s learning. I particularly explored the area, spelling. It was such a wonderful website because how it delivered the phonological practices for kids. I mean, it was fun to go through different games/activities because of its rich sound and visual effects. The activities are animated so colorfully and more than that, the narrator’s exciting intonation was what grabbed my attention the most. I think children would not feel boring doing these activities even though most of them are similar. What they do is, in the spelling section, the narrator tells the sound of the letter for them to guess the correspondent letter that eventually makes up a word. For example, the narrator says, “Which letter makes the sound “p” pig?” And then the child has to choose the letter. When they get right, the narrator encourages the child, saying comments such as “Sensational!” There are different levels, which I thought it was good. In each game, there are always directions read from the narrator in fun background music, that children would never get bored. The only downside is that you might need to dig and choose what games to do according to specific practices you want children to learn. And there are a lot of activities other than the spelling part.
I had such fun time exploring it, and I am sure the kids will enjoy them, and teachers and parents can use them, pulling up this website to do the activities together and have some fun learning the sounds of the letter!

Evaluated by: Yire Lee