Hearing the Sounds - Part 3 - Advanced Phonemic Awareness

Julie Feyereisen
Nov 7, 2023
4 min read

Phonemic Awareness

I'm sure you and your child have been learning a lot about phonemic awareness. I commend you for your efforts. This next set of activities will take your child to a whole new level. These activities are designed for 2nd graders on up. Remember, these activities are more advanced. The ability to manipulate individual sounds within a given word may be complicated. You may end up spending a greater amount of time on these activities and that is ok. You will be surprised at how much your child will accomplish with consistency and effort.

Girl listening to hear the sound. — "The ability to manipulate individual sounds within a given word may be complicated."

Blending Larger Words

You may recall from the Basic activity section when we blended words. When your child blends a word, you say each sound separately and then your child blends those sounds together to say the word. In this activity, your child will be blending larger words.

A cork board billed with post-it notes which read "Say it fast" — Blending Larger Words

Instructions:

Pronounce each sound in the word slowly. Then, tell your child, “Say it Fast”. Your child will repeat the word back to you as it is normally spoken. When you feel your child has mastered this activity, move onto the next one.

B	E	N	D	SAY IT FAST	BEND
C	R	A	SH	SAY IT FAST	CRASH

Remember that this is an auditory activity. There are words that have multiple letters that produce 1 sound.

Have fun with it!

Subtracting Sounds

You are now ready to practice subtracting sounds. Remember, this is an advanced activity so if your child does not get this concept right away, come back to it later and keep trying.

Instructions:

This is an auditory activity. You will have a list of words and part of the word will be subtracted. Say the word and ask your child to remove the sound listed. Then ask, What’s the new word?

This exercise will be broken up into five parts: Syllable subtraction, beginning sound subtraction, ending sound subtraction, beginning blend subtraction, and ending blend subtraction.

Subtracting Syllables:

Word	Subtract	Sound	What's the New Word	New Word
Shepherd	Subtract	Shep	What's the new word?	Herd
Remove	Subtract	Re	What's the new word?	Move

Pictures of a shepherd and sheep. — Subtracting Syllables

Subtracting Beginning Sounds:

Word	Subtract	Sound	What's the New Word?	New Word
Box	Subtract	B	What's the new word?	Ox
Kill	Subtract	K	What's the new word?	ill

Pictures of a box and an Ox — Subtracting Beginning Sounds

Subtracting Ending Sounds:

Word	Subtract	Sound	What's the New Word?	New Word
Peach	Subtract	Ch	What's the new word?	Pea
Spoke	Subtract	Ke	What's the new word?	Spo

Pictures of Peach and Peas — Subtracting Ending Sounds

Subtracting the Beginning Blended Letter:

Word	Subtract	Sound	What's the New Word?	New Word
Clock	Subtract	C	What's the New Word?	Lock
Stone	Subtract	S	What's the New Word?	Tone

Pictures of a Clock and Lock — Subtracting the Beginning Blended Letter

Subtracting the Ending Blended Letter:

Word	Subtract	Sound	What's the New Word?	New Word
Clamp	Subtract	P	What's the new word?	Clam
Nest	Subtract	T	What's the new word?	Nes

Pictures of Clamps and Clams — Subtracting the Ending Blended Letter

Note: Sometimes the remaining letters may not actually make a real word. Remember this is an auditory activity so your child should be able to say the remaining letters as if it were a real word. (example: WILD - D = WIL (Pronounced: While)).

Substituting Blended Sounds

Now you get to substitute blended sounds. Remember when we substituted sounds back in the basic activities? You had your child replace one sound for another to create a different word. That is all substitution is - replacing one sound for another. We did this with beginning, middle, and ending sounds. Since these are advanced activities, we will be working with blends and a few digraphs. 🙂

Instructions:

Read a word. Provide your child the new blended sound to substitute. Ask your child to say the new word. Sometimes substitution may make a different word that sounds the same but would not be spelled the same way. This is an auditory activity so the spelling does not need to be the focus.

Given Word	Sound Substitution	What's the New Word?
Floor	Substitute the FL for ST	Store
Lamp	Substitute the MP for ND	Land

Pictures of a Floor and a Store — Substituting Blended Sounds

Some words will be nonsense words. Have fun!

Swapping Sounds

Remember, these activities are advanced. If they are mastering these activities, they are well on their way to becoming a strong reader. This is one of the hardest ones. Swapping sounds entails switching the beginning sound with the ending sound. This is such a fun but challenging activity.

Instructions:

Read a word to your child. Ask your child to swap the beginning sound with the ending sound. Have them say the new word. You are only focused on the sound, not the spelling of the words. Some words will be nonsense words.

Original Word	Swap the Beginning & Ending Sounds	New Word
Face	Swap the Beginning & Ending Sounds	Safe
Pot	Swap the Beginning & Ending Sounds	Top

Pictures of a girls face and a safe — Swapping Beginning and Ending Sounds

Have fun with it!

Substituting Syllables

This is one of the last activities in the advanced section. You have already done so much with syllables. You started with blending syllables and moved onto subtracting and counting syllables. With all the work they have done, your child is ready to start substituting syllables. This is a tricky skill to master but they can do it!

Remember, a syllable is a unit of spoken language that has one vowel sound and any surrounding consonant sounds.

Instructions:

Read the word to your child. Ask them to substitute the syllable. What’s the new word? The substitution may be at the beginning or end of the word.

The Word	Substitute	The New Word
Football	Substitute Foot for Base	Baseball
Classroom	Substitute Room for Work	Classwork

Pictures of a football and baseball — Substituting Syllables

Subtracting Affixes

You are ready for the last activity in this section, subtracting affixes. An affix is an additional element placed at the beginning (prefix), middle (infix), or the end (suffix) of a word which changes the word’s meaning.

Instructions:

Read the word to your child. Ask them to subtract the affix. What’s the new word?

The Word	Subtract	The New Word
Imbalance	Subtract IM	Balance
Teacher	Subtract ER	Teach

Pictures of imbalanced scales and a girl balancing on one foot. — Subtracting Affixes

Conclusion

I am so proud of you for working on all of these activities with your child in this three part series, 'Hearing the Sounds, Part 1' & 'Hearing the Sounds, Part 2'. Well done! Increased levels of phonemic awareness have been shown to produce great readers. This is the first essential component to reading!

You have helped your child to become aware of the sounds in words, this is phonemic awareness. Now, they can take this knowledge or awareness and apply it to what they already know. When they associate the sound to the letters in words, this is phonics. Their increased level of hearing the sounds helps them be more efficient at sounding out or decoding words. You are giving your child a great foundation upon which they can have a successful reading career.

While the suggested activities in this series aren't too hard to create on your own 1-2-3 Reading has created a growing library of activities for you to work on with your child to simplify this process in the 'Reading at Grade Level' course. Feel free to get started there today.

Remember... Have fun!