Contributor: Marlene Vogel. Lesson ID: 10791
Do you know what the phonemes are in the word "phoneme"? You will have a lot of practice with phonemes using our puzzles and shark and online games so you can learn to read and write different sounds!
For example, look at the word "farm." You can change it into another word if you drop just one letter (farm > far). You can also change one word into another if you substitute a letter (farm > form)
Before you begin working on the activities in this lesson, it is important that you understand some of the vocabulary words you will see.
You will be working with Phonemes. Phonemes are the different sounds we hear in individual words. An important thing to know is that words can have more than one phoneme, or sound, in them.
For example, say the word "stop."
If you said you hear the st in the beginning of the word and the p at the end of the word, then you are correct! Those are phonemes!
You can identify phonemes using a good set of listening ears.
You do not need to know how to read or write to pick out the phonemes in a word, and it is easier to do if you are practicing a group of words that have the same phoneme in them.
For example, if we continue to use our first example, stop, and someone says the following words, it will be easy for you to tell them what phoneme the words have in common:
If someone asked you what phoneme these words have in common, what would you say? Would you say st? Our example words have the st phoneme in common!
Now that you know what a phoneme is, you also need to know that we are going to practice adding and substituting phonemes.
Adding a phoneme is simply taking a word and adding a letter or two to it so you have a different word with a different sound. An example of this would be to take the word "top" and add an "s" at the beginning of the word.
Substituting a phoneme means you are going to change a phoneme in a word to another phoneme. This one is a little harder, but you can do it — just take your time!
Since learning substituting phonemes can be a little harder than adding phonemes, you should use a visual tool to help you. Print the Phoneme Shark document found in Downloadable Resources in the right-hand sidebar.
You will notice it has two red lines that run through the shark.
Cut on each red line and glue each part of the shark in order at the top of a piece of paper. Make sure you save room to the left of the fish so that you can write a list of words you are going to change by substituting phonemes.
See the image below:
You will use this piece of paper to help you learn how to substitute phonemes. You can call this piece of paper your Phoneme Chart.
Try an easy one first. Take a look at the word "cap."
Write the word under the title List of words:
Say the word out loud.
You hear the c sound in the beginning, the a sound in the middle, and the p sound at the end of the word.
On your phoneme chart, write the word "cap" under the pictures of the fish, putting the different sounds you hear at the beginning, middle, and end under the correct picture:
Using the phoneme chart helps break a word into its different sounds and makes it easier to substitute phonemes. This word is a lot of fun! We can substitute phonemes in the beginning, the middle, and the end of the word.
Take a look at the word "cap" broken into its different sounds.
If you change the letter c to the letter t, you have a different phoneme sound and a different word. Go ahead and write your new word on your piece of paper:
Look at the word "cap" again. Try to substitute the a phoneme in the middle of the word with another phoneme. Try the u phoneme. Awesome!
That changes the word "cap" to the word "cup." Write "cup" in your list of words and then broken down under the fish pictures just like you did with tap.
Finally, look at the word "cap" again and substitute the p phoneme with another phoneme at the end of the word. Try the t phoneme. Now you have the word "cat." Again, write your new word in the list of words and then broken down under the fish pictures.
Keep your phoneme chart. You can use it today to continue practicing adding and substituting phonemes.
One last important note: Words that have 4, 5, 6, or more letters can be used in activities like the ones you just did. You are starting out with the easier words (3 letters) until you are sure you have the skills to move on to the harder words.