Sarah's First Grade Snippets: Phonemic Awareness RTI Printables

I'm so excited! I'm finally finished with the printable version of my phonemic awareness interactive RTI pack. This is another one of those packs that I started early in the year to use with my own students and slowly just added to it as I needed things. I finally buckled down to complete it. If you haven't seen my other posts about phonemic awareness, you should definitely start with my post that has phonemic awareness tips. There is a longer explanation of phonemic awareness too.

Here's the quick explanation:

Now, onto my phonemic awareness printable pack!

Here are the skills that are covered in this pack:

Initial Sounds
Final Sounds
Medial Sounds
Determining which sound is different
Segmenting Sounds
Blending Phonemes
Manipulating Sounds (deleting, adding, and substituting)

All of these activities are meant to be done with the teacher. I know often we hear printable and we think that it means independent seat work. Not here my friends! Phonemic awareness needs to be taught explicitly and interactively with student and teacher.

Every section has a cover with written directions and a visual to help. :)

Tabs separate the skills. There are 2-6 activities per tab and several versions of each activity.

Initial Sounds:

Final and Medial Sounds

Segmenting Sounds

Phonemic awareness can be taught in small doses. I used one page per day. For this segmenting page, I would say the picture word. Together, we would stretch the words (possibly with slinkies or invisible slinkies. I've also seen teachers start at their shoulder and use the opposite hand to slide down the arm while stretching the word. "/llllll/ /oooooo/ /g/" Then, the student uses these math chips to push the sounds into the circles. Your student may need you to model this first. At times, I had to model it more than once. We might work on the log picture much more than once. I do it, they try it. I do, they try it. I do it, they try it. They need to hear it and practice it. Obviously don't go overboard, but it doesn't hurt to practice the same word a few times if they need it. I want them to hear all three sounds.

There are several of these pages and then several more pages that takes it one step further. First, they segment. Then they identify the sound in gray. It takes phonemic awareness and some auditory memory.

Blending Sounds

I play a lot of Guess My Word. I usually use a puppet and say my puppet speaks a little differently. He has to say every sound clearly and slowly. He'll say words (with the sounds segmented) and I'll ask the class to help me "translate".

For this activity, I would choose a picture word and segment it. Students find that word and cover it.

This is the same idea but in a Tic Tac Toe fashion.

I included six different "Scene Sounds" pages. There are two ways to use these pages. The teacher can segment a word, like /d/ /u/ /k/ . Students will blend the word, duck, and find it in the scene.

They can cover it with a chip or color it. This activity could totally be whole class. You could give each student a copy and they could color on their own sheet. Just because it's on one page, doesn't mean it has to be done in one day. You could do a few words a day.

Manipulating phonemes comes after your students are able to blend and segment. The following activities give students opportunities to practice manipulating phonemes.

Here, students will figure out which sound changed to go from the first picture to the next. To change math to map, you need to change the last sound. To change map to mop you need to change the middle sound.

The next activity is similar, but a little harder. You tell students which sound changes and they choose the correct word. Start with the first picture: /m/ /a/ /p/. Point to the second sound /a/. Decide which picture shows the change.

There are two ways to organize this resource. You could put it all in a binder:

Or in files. If you are planning on using it with small groups, I recommend the file system because you can fit multiple copies. You could laminate six copies of each so you have small group activities ready to go and reuse.