Levels 7 and 8 appear together in the compilation package for phonological awareness by Sheils and Sawyers.
As you can see in my summary presentation, these are the levels:
- Level 7: Blending phonemes to make words
- Level 8: Phonemic segmentation
This is what we usually call 'segmenting and blending', but for phonemic awareness, we only work with sounds, not letters.
For level 7, I used the activity named 'Using a phoneme frame', which is the well-known 'Feed the monster' using only phonemes, not letters.
For level 8, the activity I chose was 'Drawing lines in pictures', highly used in English-speaking countries.
Using a phoneme frame
This activity is like a second part of the activity I used in Level 6, but now we are going to work with more sounds, with every sound in a word, to blend the phonemes and make up the word.
In my example, we are working on CVC monosyllabic words:
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| Click on the picture to download the activity |
As you can see, in this particular case we need three counters, one for each sound (CVC). Teacher should demonstrate using the frames many times, using the counters on a table, on a whiteboard or on the smartboard. The idea is to say the phoneme and move a counter into the box. Then, we blend the phonemes and say the word.
Usually segmenting and blending are worked together using this kind of frames. In this video you can see an example of how to do it:
If you only want to work on blending, don't say the word before the isolated phonemes and, of course, don't provide the children with pictures!
Drawing lines in pictures
We can work with this activity in several ways. The one I chose aims to explain the children how we can segment words, but you can use it to blend as well. My idea was to show the children how to segment certain words. Then, I would hand out worksheets with the pictures in the big rectangles and children would have to make the lines to segment the word.
Here you are an example from my activity. To download the whole activity CLICK HERE.
