How to Develop Your Child’s Phonological Awareness in Easy, Fun, Free Ways

For better or for worse, school experiences shape our ideas of what learning looks–and feels–like. But teaching your own children can happen in the course of everyday family activities and needn’t mimic the formality and distance of traditional classrooms with a parent at a whiteboard and the child behind a desk (or computer). Family learning should be much more organic and conversational than that. And when it comes to teaching the foundational but often-overlooked pre-reading skill of phonological awareness, it can definitely be fun and on the fly, too.

Phonological awareness is the conscious ability to recognize and manipulate sound segments within words, and it’s right up there with oral language and letter knowledge as a pillar of literacy. It’s critical to understand that spoken words can be divided into smaller sounds in order to read in alphabetic writing systems like English. Letters exist to represent, in writing, the sequences of sounds that we hear in speech. When kids struggle with reading, an underlying and overlooked cause can be that they have difficulty processing speech sounds. Yet most parents don’t think about spending time on kids’ phonological awareness. 

The main way for parents to help kids develop phonological awareness is through play. It’s not drill and kill. It’s singing “The Name Game.” It’s talking in Pig Latin. It’s playing I Spy with beginning sounds or rhyming words instead of colors. (I spy something that rhymes with tike. Yes, the bike!)

When you recite nursery rhymes, you’re heightening kids’ sensitivity to the syllables and the beginning, middle, and ending sounds within words. The stress patterns of classics like “Jack and Jill Went up the Hill” help them learn about syllables and rhymes, important phonological awareness skills. And the alliteration in “Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers” accentuates the /p/ sound and distinguishes it from surrounding sounds, a finer-grained level of sensitivity to sounds.

You can easily build phonological awareness anytime, anywhere, with just your voice and your child’s attention. You don’t need a book (although they can help). You don’t need paper. You don’t need a table. You don’t even need to be still—neighborhood strolls or car, bus, or subway rides present lovely opportunities for this kind of banter. Just keep in mind their age and find a few go-to activities to incorporate into the things you’re already doing together. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Focus on syllable-blending (bat plus man equals batman) and syllable-clapping activities with 2- and 3-year-olds.

• How many syllables are in elevator? 3
• Put this word together: cup plus cake. Cupcake
• Say the syllables in elephant. E-le-phant
• What’s the word applesauce without apple? Sauce

For 3- and 4-year-olds, emphasize rhyming skills, along with blending and segmenting starting and ending sounds.  

• Do cup and pup rhyme? Yes. Do cup and cake rhyme? No.
• Tell me some words that rhyme with win. Bin, kin, sin, thin
• Put this word together: c-at
• Divide sleep into two parts. Sl-eep

With 4-year-olds, dig into individual sounds as your child gets more familiar with the alphabet.

• Which words start with the same sound: bug, bowl, fish? Bug, bowl
• What’s the first sound in zoo? /z/
• What sound is the same in cow, cat, camel, kangaroo, and koala? /k/

By age 5 and 6, kids may initiate sound games on their own, by doing things like talking in Pig Latin to friends. Ooday ouyay ememberray atthay amegay?

• Which word starts with a different sound—bad, bat, rag, bag? Rag
• Put this word together:  /y/ /e/ /s/. Yes!
• What sounds do you hear in the word bat? /b/, /a/, /t/
• What word do you get if you add /b/ to /r/ /a/ /g/. Brag
• The word is bug. Change the /b/ to /h/. What’s the new word? Hug

Next, typically after six years old, kids can get adept at blending, segmenting, deleting, adding, and substituting sounds in words. That’s when you can add phonological play like Spoonerisms into the mix. These are when you swap the starting sounds of two words (usually to comical effect). Sometimes they occur naturally in conversation when you accidentally say things like I “zipped the skoom meeting” instead of “I skipped the Zoom meeting.” But you can intentionally mix up initial sounds as a game, and get your little one in on the action. Just explain the game and give examples, like: Let’s mix up some sounds. Instead of saying, “It’s dinner time,” we can say, “It’s timmer dime” if we flip-flop the starting sounds. What happens if you swap the starting sounds in “Tootsie Roll”? Yes, that would be “rootsie toll”!

This is all meant to be wordplay, not an interrogation! Get excited and cheer together when your child solves the puzzle. If they struggle or don’t get it, laugh together. A great irony of raising readers is that the critically important, life-trajectory-altering, high-stakes work of building these foundational skills is best done with the lightest, nearly imperceptible touch. The subtler the accumulation of moments of speech, song, and play over the course of years, the better, experts agree.

As you nurture these skills, remember to keep things light, fun and encouraging. “If you’re trying to do exercise and it’s really tough and you’ve got a trainer or someone telling you you’re not getting it right, you just stop going,” Gillon from the University of Canterbury says. “And it’s the same with children. They like to do things that they’re getting lots of positive praise and encouragement for. If it’s fun, they’ll keep doing it.”Or, put another way, if it’s not fun, don’t do it.

Edited and reprinted with permission from Reading for Our Lives by Maya Payne Smart, published by AVERY, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Copyright © 2022 by Maya Payne Smart.