Phonemes in use: Multiple activities for a critical process

Manyak, P.C. (2008). Phonemes in use: Multiple activities for a critical process. The Reading Teacher, 61(8), 659-662.


Here's a set of five easy activities to practice the components of phonemic awareness. The activities are clearly described with examples. Anyone could implement these.

I guess I'm not sure I'd want to. They really seem, first of all, a bit dull for young children. I guess if you kept it brief, fast-paced, and gamelike, it wouldn't be too bad. But these activities stress words out of context and even letters as isolated sounds and not always as parts of words, though they do stress blending as well as segmentation. I wonder, though, how confusing some of these activities could be for kids. The "irregular" words are carefully avoided, but when kids actually read real stories, they begin to run into those words right away. Plus, what about dialects? I'm reminded of the little boy's valentine to me, "Dhartz" (the hearts).

I do like the last two activities, which help children "map" phoneme-grapheme correspondences. That may be useful for helping kids notice patterns, either in regular words or irregular ones.