Standard 2: Reading Foundations

Students will develop foundational skills for future reading success by working with sounds, letters, and text.

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS: Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize, think about, and manipulate sounds in spoken language without using text. 

Student Actions 

Teacher Actions 

• Students will begin to identify spoken words that begin with the same sound. 

• Teachers state groups of words with the same initial sound exaggerating the initial sound for students to hear.

• Teachers provide students opportunities to distinguish the initial sound from groups of stated words.

• Teachers state groups of words with all but one having the same initial sounds (oddity tasks-see above example).

• Teachers provide students opportunities to recognize which initial sound does not belong to the group of words stated and the initial sound of the rest of the words. Example: “/d/ /og/, /d/ /ig/, /c/ /at/.” “Which word does not belong with the other two that has the same initial sound? (cat) What sound does the other two have in common? (/d/)”.  

Resources

Teacher Insights 

How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities (PDF)

Florida Center for Reading Research:  Pre-K Activities (webpage)

Florida Center for Reading Research:  Alliteration Activities (PDF)

• The ability to focus on beginning sounds of words is an early step in sound or phoneme segmentation.

• Students first learn to identify and match words that begin with the same sounds.  They later begin to develop the ability to produce words that begin with the same sound.

• Oddity tasks, such as having students identify which words that do not have the same beginning sounds (e.g.,  mouse, table, monkey) supports the skill of recognizing beginning sounds. Students at this level will need support and guidance as they explore teacher-led oddity tasks.

• Model initial sound isolation explicitly in the beginning and with students having difficulty with this concept. Show a picture of a map, say, “This is a map, map begins with /m/, listen /mmm/ap.  What sound does map begin with?” Students are to reproduce the /m/ sound.  

Due to recursive nature of the standards, it is essential that teachers are aware of how all objectives within and between strands work together for optimal instruction.