After 'Recognition and production of initial sounds', it's time to work on final sounds, the 6th level in the 'Phonological awareness package', by Sheils and Sawyers.
In this level, as in the previous one, we can choose among a large amount of activities to carry out. I choose a very simple one from the package, called 'Last sound last'.
After working on final sounds, and having working initial sounds before, we could work on middle sounds as well. In this way, we could work with monosyllabic words whose type of syllable is consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC), distinguishing every sound in the word. To develop this aim I chose another activity, also from the package, called 'Beginning, middle or end?'.
Last Sound Last
In this activity the children must tell which is final -and common- sound in the words showed.
In this slide, the common sound is /n/ (pen, moon, sun). Remember we are working on sounds, not letters, although sometimes they are coincident.
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| You can download the activity, with every slide, clicking on the image. |
When out children are familiar with this kind of activity, we can add more pictures and one odd out (a picture of a word ending with a different sound from the rest of the words showed).
Beginning, middle or end
Once our pupils are familiar with the different sounds in English and are able to distinguish and isolate initial and final sounds, we can start working on middle sounds for CVC monosyllabic words.
For this activity we need:
- blank 3 x phoneme box card
- a counter for each student
This activity use the very well-known box card used for the activity usually called 'Feed the monster'. Because of this, I decided to create my own design for the phoneme box card and the counters, using the character Triky, the cookie monster from Sesame Street.
Anyway, we are NOT going to use LETTERS in this activity, just plain counters for the SOUNDS. You can even use real biscuits, that always works.
This is my slide for the whiteboard - that is what the sheet for the children should be like. You can download it clicking on the pic:
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| Click on the picture to download the .notebook file. |
This activity works in the following way:
Tell students that you are going to say a list of words. All the words contains, for example, the sound /s/. Some words have the sound /s/ at the beginning, some in the middle and some at the end. If students hear the /s/ sound at the beginning of the word, they put the counter in the first circle/box; if they hear the /s/ sound in the middle, they put the counter in the middle circle/box, and if they hear the /s/ sound at the end of the word, they place the counter in the last circle/box.
These are some examples of words you can use, given in the package:
/s/ set, sock, bus, miss, mess, ask, safe, kiss, soup.
/p/ pack, mop, apple, hope, open, tap, pen, keep
/m/ man, moon, ham, some, room, ham, made, seem, amp
/d/ dog, duck, pad, toad, read, dig, rod, idle
As we are not working with English-speaking children, we should adapt the activity and use words our children now.
