The students get to play hide-and-seek and learn to focus on sounds at the same time. The teacher hides a clicking stove timer or a ticking clock somewhere in the classroom. She calls on a few students to look for the item. Children will have to fine tune their listening skills to detect where the noise is located in the room before the timer buzzes. This kind of listening is also necessary for manipulating the phonemes (individual sounds) in words.
Sound echoing is an auditory activity. The teacher says the sound for a specific letter of the alphabet, and the child repeats it. After saying some sounds in isolation, the teacher will say that she is now going to say sounds that will make words. For example, she says the sounds "c-a-t." Hopefully, some of the children will hear the word "cat." The teacher repeats this activity with several three-letter words. Preschoolers will have fun trying to guess the new word.
Making words is a challenging activity, but a child's ability to delete, isolate or substitute sounds to make new words helps teachers determine their reading readiness. The teacher says a word like "cake" and ask the child to take away the "c" sound and say the new word. Then she asks the student to take away the "c" sound and replace with the sound for "t" and say the new word. This activity also reinforces rhyming and word families.
Rhyming is one of the main tools used by teachers for phonological reinforcement. Rhyming words are available in many children's texts and nursery rhymes, and rhyming activities help young readers learn the difference between beginning sounds while producing words with the same ending sounds. Teachers begin by keeping games simple like saying a word and having kids produce a rhyming word. As children become familiar with the process, teachers can work on more advanced skills like producing nonsense rhyming words or reading poetry and having children identify the rhyming words they heard.