Phonemic Awareness Interventions: Keeping Students Engaged

Through the science of reading, we know how critical it is for young students to receive daily, structured practice with phonemic awareness. For students who need more support, additional instruction and repetition might be needed. In this post, I’m sharing tips for how to keep students engaged and motivated during phonemic awareness interventions.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

I have written an entire blog post about phonemic awareness and how it differs from phonics, if you’d like to read more about this topic. But, as a quick reminder, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in words. Phonemic awareness is considered a foundational pre-reading skill that is vital to literacy instruction. Students don’t need to master the alphabet in order to practice phonemic awareness skills. In fact, some people say that phonemic awareness can be practiced with your eyes closed!

Phonemic Awareness Interventions

Since phonemic awareness is so vital to literacy development, it is important to support students who might be having trouble with these skills. Repetition through additional interventions can go a long way in helping students improve their phonemic awareness skills. 

However, this repetition can become very monotonous and boring for students. That’s why I wanted to share some tips and resources to keep students engaged in phonemic awareness practice during phonemic awareness interventions.

5 Tips for More Engaging Interventions

1. Use Unique Activities

When I taught kindergarten, we used a program called Heggerty for whole group phonemic awareness instruction. It was great, easy to implement, and effective for tier one instruction. At the time, our instructional coaches told us to use the program multiple times with the kids who struggled. The problem is that they’d get bored because they had already done these exact activities. I decided to create unique phonemic awareness activities as an alternative way to practice the same skills.

2. Align Activities to the Curriculum

Even if you use unique intervention activities to increase engagement, it’s still important that these activities are aligned with the curriculum that you’re using. You can use intervention time to give students more repetition with skills you’ve worked on with the whole class. This can make the additional instruction more effective and engaging.

Young students thrive on predictability. When they arrive at a small group table and are presented with a skill that they’ve never practiced before, they will undoubtedly spend a lot of their mental energy on the fact that they’re learning something brand new. They might even be more hesitant to participate. On the other hand, when the skills you’re practicing align with a curriculum they’re already familiar with, students will be much more likely to dive in and participate. 

3. Keep Groups Small

Another way to keep phonemic awareness practice more engaging is to keep your groups small. When students have to wait a long time for their turn to identify a sound or answer a question, it’s easier for them to lose their attention and motivation to participate.

Keeping intervention groups as small as possible can also give you the chance to provide more immediate feedback. Small groups give you the chance to really listen to how students are understanding phonemes, providing correction or positive feedback as you go. This makes the lessons so much more engaging for students, because they know they’re on the right track!

4. Use Visuals

Visuals are an excellent way to bring more engagement to your intervention lessons! If you have a student who is resistant to practicing their phonemic awareness skills, you could use a visual schedule to outline the different activities you’ll be doing during your time together. When students can see the clear path of the lesson time, they are more likely to engage in the activities.

Even though phonemic awareness can be practiced with their eyes closed, young students are still developing their auditory processing skills. Adding worksheets and other visuals to the mix can help students process the words that are being presented during your lessons. They still don’t need to be able to identify letters, but having the visual support can go a long way in keeping students more motivated and engaged in phonemic awareness practice.

5. Incorporate Hands-On Practice

Finally, the activities that you use during intervention can make all the difference in student engagement! For example, pocket chart activities are a great option because they provide an ongoing visual throughout the lesson and you can easily turn them into a game. 

For this syllable sorting activity, you could place the cards face down on the table and have students take turns choosing a picture. Once they’ve selected the card, they can identify the number of syllables and then place it in the correct place on the pocket chart. 

Worksheets can also make your lessons more engaging! Think about going to a meeting when you don’t have any sort of written agenda, then compare that to a workshop where you have a copy of the discussion slides for note-taking. You are more likely to remember the information from the second workshop, right? The same is true for our young kindergarten students! When they can hear, see, AND write as they practice phonemic awareness, they will be more engaged and the information is more likely to stick!

Printable Phonemic Awareness Activities for Kindergarten

I have put together a bundle of resources that will help your students get the additional phonemic awareness practice they need. These printables and worksheets make it easy to supplement your curriculum and provide your students with many opportunities for targeted practice with sounds in words.

If you’d like to take a closer look at everything included in this bundle of phonemic awareness activities, you can find it in the Teaching Exceptional Kinders shop or in my TPT store.

Save These Phonemic Awareness Intervention Tips

Be sure to save this post if you’d like to come back to it later. Just add the pin below to your favorite board of kindergarten teaching ideas. You’ll be able to quickly find these tips and resources when you’re planning intervention activities for phonemic awareness practice.