Issues with Phonics

There is one boy in my class who struggles with phonics, specifically with segmenting and blending to form words. He knows his letter sounds but is unable to separate words out into their individual phonemes and then blend them together when we read a story. He does know some sight words but still struggles with many of these as well. Right now he spends his time practicing reading but I feel that he may need to back up a step or at least spend more time with just practicing how to put words together through segmenting and blending. He could really benefit from some one-on-one help.

The main concept that he needs work with then before he can move forward towards reading is probably getting some practice with segmenting and blending words. The first activity I might try with him is just focusing on beginning sounds by providing him with a word and asking him to just give me the beginning sound or the first sound he hears in that word. Then I would ask him for the middle sound and then finally the last sound. (I would make these short words such as cat, log, red, bin, etc). After that we would practice putting the word together to form a whole word. We would practice these together and then I would ask him to try a few on his own.

A second activity I might try would be one similar to the phonological awareness activities we did in class today, blending phonemes into real words. I would say the different phonemes of a word (i.e. /d/ /o/ /g/) and then ask him to tell me what the word is. Along with this activity I would include having him segment the words that I say (i.e. I give him the word “not” and he replies /n/ /o/ /t/). This would help him get some practice with segmenting and blending orally before looking at an actual word on paper and trying it on his own.

A third activity I would want to do with him would then be to do some practice with putting letters together to form words as well as rhyming. I would cut out squares that had different letters on each square. I would then segment a word out loud and ask him to find the corresponding letters to the sounds and put them together to then discover the word. For example, if I said /r/ /a/ /g/, he would have to find the letter that corresponds with each sound and put them together, then look at the word himself and blend in order to come up with the word. I would make it so that some words would have similar beginning sounds and others would have similar ending sounds (i.e. doing “rat” and “rag”, or “hat” and “sat”). This would help him start to form a better idea of how words are put together and that many words are very similar and only vary but a single letter or sound.

Through all of this I feel it would be important to just move slowly. I feel that he is being rushed through a lot of the work and is failing to grasp concepts but the rest of the class continues to move forward while he falls further and further behind. Through activities such as these I feel he could gain some valuable insight into phonics and other aspects of phonemic awareness that would be really helpful for him. In addition to these types of one-on-one activities, in whole group discussion I would spend time incorporating other activities for beginning readers as is mentioned on p. 97 of the Tompkins book, like reading charts of poems and songs using choral reading. I think that had activities such as these been incorporated into daily learning right from the start of his education then this student may not have had as many issues as he currently faces.