My small group coaching members asked for some printable materials inspired by the Science of Reading, so I got to work putting together a bunch of phonological and phonemic awareness activities! I created these Phoneme Manipulation Sound Games cards as a Montessori phonemic awareness activity that works on taking phonemes (the smallest parts of words) and manipulating them to make new words.

The first step is phoneme addition, or adding a sound to a word to turn it into a new word. For example, “Take the word ‘and’ and add /h/ to the beginning. Now you have hand!” With each of these phoneme manipulation games, you’ll start with beginning sounds, then do ending sounds once those are mastered.

Next comes phoneme deletion, or removing a sound from a word to turn it into a new word. For example, “Take the word ‘clips’ and remove /c/ from the beginning. Now you have lips!” Again, you’ll start with beginning sounds, then do ending sounds once those are mastered.

The final step is phoneme substitution, or replacing one sound in a word with another to turn it into a new word. For example, “Take the word ‘cat’ and replace /c/ with /b/. Now you have bat!” With phoneme substitution, you start with beginning sounds, then do ending sounds, and finally replace middle sounds.

You can do this as a simple word game without any manipulatives, but it’s more fun to do with cards which provide a control of error via the photo card.

Get it now!

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