Phoneme Fun Part 1: Deleting Phonemes in Initial Blends

1. The teacher will present the slideshow to the students.

2. The teacher will use slides 2 and 3 to explain the terms phoneme and blend. 

• A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a spoken word.
• A consonant blend is two or three consonants that occur together in a word and that keep their sounds. 

3. The teacher will say, "Today we are going to practice phonemic awareness skills by carefully noticing each of the spoken sounds in words. We are going to be working with words that have consonant blends as their initial sounds. We are going to practice deleting the initial sound of each word." Remind students that initial means first, if needed.

4. The teacher will show slide 4. The teacher should say the whole word star and have students repeat it. The teacher should segment each phoneme in the word star (/s/ /t/ /a/ /r/) while clicking the mouse for each sound. Counters will appear in the Elkonin boxes to represent each sound. The teacher should isolate the initial sound (/s/) and have students repeat it. Then, the teacher should say, "Star without the /s/ is tar" while clicking the mouse to make the initial counter disappear. Students should repeat the word tar. 

5. Repeat these steps for slides 5-9, with the goal of providing less teacher support each time. For example:

Teacher: "Plate"

Students: "Plate, /p /l/ /A/ /te/." (While the teacher is clicking the mouse for counters to represent sound.)

Teacher: Plate without the /p/ is.... (Teacher clicks the mouse to make the initial counter disappear.)

Students: "Late!"