The following activities will help increase your students phonemic knowledge. For additional activities and more information click on the additional information link. Michael McKenna (2002) suggests the following activities to help provide phonics instruction to students in upper grades:
Compare-Contrast - This effective, research based strategy is basically decoding by analogy with known words. For example, when a student runs into an unfamiliar one-syllable words, the student finds the vowel and checks to see if the vowel and the consonant or consonant cluster that follow are part of a familiar word. The student removes the onset (beginning consonant or consonants) from the familiar word. The student then attaches the onset to the unfamiliar word and pronounces the word in two chunks. Familiar words containing useful rimes should be placed on the board or on a poster in the classroom for easy reference.
Word Walls - This activity is a good support for the previous activity. The word wall is columns of words. These columns could either be words in the same rime family or could be organized using the vowel sounds of familiar words.
Word Sorts - phonics word sorts require students to put words into categories based on a shared feature related to pronunciation, spelling, or word structure. This are not about word meaning. These word sorts deal with the sight and sound of words. A variation of this activity would be to allow students to work with partners or in small teams. This will allow for differentiation because the type of sort can be different depending on each team or pairs needs.
Recorded Books - allow students to follow along with the printed text as they listen to a book.
Electronic Books - allowing students to read books either online or with digital readers provides them access to pronunciation of individual words by simply pointing and clicking. This feature allows students to read material that is at their listening level of comprehension. This same material would be frustrating to read without the added features provided by digital text.
Additional activities: Syllable Challenge Ball Game
Understanding syllables helps students better understand how to break up the sounds that make up a single word. To play this game, students stand in a circle. The teacher says a number between one and four and tosses the ball to a student. The student must then say a word that contains that number of syllables. If the student answers correctly, s/he tosses the ball to another student and says a number between one and four. If student is unable to answer correctly, they are given another opportunity to answer and then may request help from the class. The ball is then tossed to another classmate. Continue playing until all students have had an opportunity to answer. This is a good follow-up activity to a unit on syllables.