How Phonological Awareness & Spelling Connect - Intervention Tip of the Week

Hey there!

Today we wanted to share a quick intervention tip on using a Phonological Awareness strategy to support spelling.

Syllable & phoneme segmenting and how they support spelling

When we break words into syllables we are creating chunks. So for example in the word alligator, we are breaking the word up into al - lig - a - tor.

Then once we have a word in chunks, we want to break it up further into sounds (aka phonemes). We like to do this by having students use chips or a manipulative but if you don’t have them you can simply have a student draw lines on a piece of paper or whiteboard for each sound they hear.

Then, they need to attach letters (or letter groups) to the sound block. You can check out the video below to see this in action with single-syllable words.

Now, if you have a student or students spelling longer words you would start by:

1. Segmenting the word into syllables

Start by having the student break the word into syllables. In the picture - you see two scoops for the syllables in the word “railroad.”

2. Segmenting each syllable into sounds.

Once you have your word in syllables, segment each syllable into sounds like you see in the picture above. Then, students should identify what makes each sound. For older or more advanced students, you can begin to pull in affixes here as well.

You can see this in action by watching the video at the bottom of the page!

You can grab this activity in our 5CCL Library by clicking the image, or on Teachers Pay Teachers >>here.<<

Auditory Discrimination will also play a big role in students’ abilities to spell.

Auditory discrimination, or the ability to hear the differences between sounds, will impact students’ ability to correctly identify which sounds they are hearing in the word. For example, if students struggle with differentiating between /b/ and /p/, then they may struggle to spell words like bear/pear, pin/bin, etc.

We like to draw students’ attention to their mouth formation when working on minimal pairs and similar-sounding phonemes (mirrors are great tools for this!) and use sorting activities to help them practice identifying the different sounds.

For more Science of Reading-aligned resources for phonological awareness and the other core components of literacy, check out the 5CCL Activity Library by clicking the link below.