Stretching out words is a vital skill when learning how to read and write. This bundle gives you a variety of activities to use in your RTI groups or to throw in literacy centers to work on phoneme segmentation.
For students to be able to read and write, they need to learn how to break down words and listen for the sounds they hear. Phoneme segmentation is the process of stretching words into phonemes (sounds). By helping students learn how to stretch out the sounds in words, it builds confidence in their writing. I want students to focus on the process of writing and not making sure everything is spelled correctly. My students in the past that were focused on the spelling and not just writing, progressed much slower than those that just tried to write based on what they heard. Here are a few examples of how primary students would stretch out a word based on the sounds they hear, not necessarily the letters in the word.
Turtle = trtl Happy = hape Whistle = wisl
Learning how to sound out words takes a lot of practice, so I created this Phoneme Segmentation RTI Printables Bundle. It includes 5 separate activities that can be differentiated to help students learn how to segment words.
These flip books can be made into a book or used in your interactive notebook. It comes with 2 versions so students can circle the number of sounds they hear in the word, or use a BINGO dabber to dot the number of sounds. If you don’t have BINGO dabbers, you could use stickers, crayons, stamps, etc.
To use them in notebooks, have students cut on the line and write the word underneath the flap.
This fun caterpillar themed game has students roll a dice, find that picture on the caterpillar, and mark how many sounds they hear in the word.
Students spin the paperclip and find a picture with that many sounds in the word. The other version has students spin a picture and hunt for the number showing how many sounds they heard.
In “I Spy” students will circle the picture that has the correct number of sounds shown in the magnifying glass. There is another version where students circle the correct number of sounds in the picture shown.
The “Sort it Out” worksheets have students cut & past 3 letter and 4 letter words.
Here’s another way to practice counting out the sounds in a word.
Here’s an example of student using phonetic spelling with my Interactive Reading Responses. You can see the words small, monkey, silly, and animals have all be sounded out. I am so proud that this student wrote all this by themselves! Ask any Kindergarten teacher and they’d be able to read this just fine 🙂 Eventually, spelling rules come into play and students learn how to write words correctly, but in Kindergarten for now, this is great progress!