Toad-ally Exceptional Learners: Isolating Phonemes--Initial Sounds

January 29, 2012

From KPM Doodles

This will one of three posts on isolating phonemes that I will share as I create materials for my small groups in kindergarten that are struggling with mastering these skills.

Isolating phonemes is a strategy that allows students to recognize individual sounds in a word. Attending to these phonemes increases students’ awareness that words are made up of individual sounds that connect together to form a word. When students apply this strategy, they are demonstrating their ability to think about and separate individual sounds from one another within a word (e.g., the first sound in dog is /d/, the medial sound in wet in /e/, and the final sound in like is /k/.

Identifying phonemes is a strategy in which students focus on separate distinctions of initial, medial, and final sounds in words in recognize their similarities and differences. Students who can use this strategy are able to think about and notice that two or more words may have the same initial sound, medial sound, or final sounds. Identifying these sounds is important as students move through the development stages of reading, and it provides students with a tool for reading as well as writing.

Initial Sounds