Provide children with craft making activities that focus on the sounds letters make. For example, have them create a collage of items that begin with a specific letter -- a collage of ants, apples, apes and alligator pictures when working on the letter "A," for example.
Engage children in sound sorting activities. Set out several items, such as toys or pictures and instruct children to sort the items into piles based on the sounds that they begin with or end with. For example, items that begin with the letter "B" go in one pile and items that begin with the letter "C" go in another pile.
Play sound hunting games. State a letter or a sound. Instruct children to search around the room for an item that begins with the letter or the sound you have stated.
Encourage children to identify where they hear a particular sound in a word. State a sound and a word and ask children to determine whether they hear the sound at the beginning, middle or end of a word. For example, ask children where they hear the /g/ sound in the word "dig."
Match rhyming words. Draw pictures that illustrate words that rhyme. Set one pile of pictures in a face-down pile and spread the other pile out on the floor. Instruct children to pick up a card from the face-down pile and encourage them to match the image in their hands to an image on the floor. For instance, if a child picks up a picture of a bat, he may match it to a picture of a cat.
Teach onset and rimes. Onsets refer to the initial consonant sound in a word and rime refers to the first vowel sound and everything that follows in a word. Provide children with a rime; "id," for example and ask them to make as many words as they can think of using the rime by changing the onset -- "lid," "hid," "rid" and "kid," for instance.