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Multisensory Activities for Learning Phonemes

At a basic level of education, children learn to distinguish different sounds from others and discover that the words used in language are constructed of distinct sound components. These units of sound are termed phonemes and some activities within education for pre-kindergarten kids are geared toward teaching about them. When these activities are multisensory in nature, kids learn effectively because it allows the child’s brain alternative ways to absorb information.
  1. Sound Tiles

    • You’ll need to assemble a collection of sound tiles, which can be as simple as pieces of cardboard, each containing a component of a word. For example, a few cards could read: "s," "p," "ee" and "ch." Give these tiles to the student, and then call out a word. The student must listen to the word carefully to identify the phonemes involved and physically construct that word using the sound tiles available. Call out another pre-planned word for the student to make.

    Area Jumping

    • Create three or four divided areas on the floor for this activity. Each of these areas should be marked with a color, such as red or blue; you can use mats for this purpose. Put the areas in order; you might have red, green and blue, for example. Call out a word and challenge the child to determine the number of sounds in that word. For each sound the student hears, the child should jump across from one area to the next in the correct order.

    Song with Actions

    • This activity is suited to a small group of children and aims to enhance phonemic awareness. Demonstrate the activity by saying a word aloud and then indicating the number of sounds that makes up the word. For each sound, demonstrate an action. You might, for example, touch your head for the first sound, your shoulders for the second sound, and so on. Then say the word again in a song-like fashion and instruct the class to follow your example.

    Stretchy Toys

    • Purchase stretchy toys that you can give to kids. Kids use the toys to demonstrate their understanding of the phonemic segmentation of words. Give each child a word and repeat it a few times, providing emphasis to the individual sounds within. The child then repeats the word and stretches the toy a little more each time he comes across a phoneme in the word. After completing the word, he snaps it back while repeating the word to practice blending together the sounds.

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