Excerpted from Road to the Code: A Phonological Awareness Program for Young Children by Benita A. Blachman, Ph.D., Eileen Wynne Ball, Ph.D., Rochella Black, M.S., & Darlene M. Tangel, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2000 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Teacher Notes for Lesson 1

Say-It-and-Move-It is an activity designed to heighten an awareness of the phonemes in spoken words. It is intended to take approximately 5-7 minutes of each lesson and can be conducted with a group or with individual children. Children are taught to segment words by first repeating a target word and then moving one disk (or other small object, e.g. tile, block, or button) for each sound that they say in the word. Finally, after the word is segmented, it is blended (spoken normally).

Say-It-and-Move-It sheets are used in each lesson. These are in the Materials Section of the manual and should be photocopied. (The words Materials Section are in bold to alert you that the materials you need to prepare (e.g., photocopy, color, cut) for the specific activity being described are provided in the manual.) For variety, you can use sheets with different pictures or shapes on different days. For the first few lessons, you might give each child a Say-It-and-Move-It sheet with a clown face on it. The following week, you might want to use a different Say-It-and-Move-It sheet for each lesson. The picture or shape is simply a place for the children to store their disks.

You should begin by modeling the correct way to segment the target word. (It is easier to model this task if your Say-It-and-Move-It sheet is facing the children.) First the target word is spoken; then each sound is spoken in an elongated fashion as a disk is moved for each sound. Pause only if there is a ^ sign to represent a pause. Stop sounds (sounds that cannot be held without distortion, e.g. /b/, /d/, /p/, /t/) are spoken quickly and are not elongated.

All vowels used in these activities have their short sounds. If you are unfamiliar with the short vowel sounds, you might use these key words to help you remember them:
a as in apple, animal
i as in igloo, itch
o as in octopus, olive
u as in umbrella, ugly
e as in edge, Ed

Because the Say-It-and-Move-It activity utilizes a lot of stimulating materials (e.g., blocks, disks, pictures), it is important to teach your students specific behaviors to use during the segmentation part of each lesson. If you follow these suggestions, the Say-It-and-Move-It activity will be more successful.

First, the children need to be sitting still on their chairs and watching you model the activity. This is an activity that requires focused attention. Remember, however, that this portion of the lesson takes only 5-7 minutes, so the expectation for focused attention is developmentally appropriate for most kindergarten children.

Next, it should be stressed to the children that only one finger of one hand should be used for moving the manipulative objects (e.g., disks, tiles, blocks). It is helpful to encourage the students to have their "moving finger" ready. You might want to have the children hold up their index (pointing) finger to show that it's ready. Some teachers sing a song or play a little game ("show me your ready finger") to encourage the children to use just one finger. If the children use two or more fingers or both hands to move the disks, it is helpful for you to say, "Watch me. I'm using only one hand and one finger of that hand. Now, you try it."

In addition, the children should always store the manipulative objects on the picture portion of their Say-It-and-Move-It sheets. You can be creative in your instructions depending on the particular picture you are using. For example, if the clown face is being used, you might say, "Let's give our clowns earrings or teeth with our disks today." This type of instruction may reduce the amount of fiddling or excess playing with the objects as the lesson begins. Finally, teach the children to "sweep" the objects back to the picture after completing each segmenting task.

It is important to remember that this is a listening (oral language) and sound counting activity. It is not a letter recognition activity or an activity in which the letters must be associated with sounds. Therefore, any sounds could actually be used. Because the children will learn the short sounds of the vowels during the letter sound portion of this program, we have chosen to include only short vowel sounds during the Say-It-and-Move-It activities in this manual. Remember, when you see a letter inside these slanted lines / /, use the letter sound. When the letter is underlined, use the letter name.

You will also see sentences or phrases in bold. This is suggested dialogue to use with your children. The script that is not in bold is not meant to be read aloud.

Letter Name and Sound Instruction

Like the Say-It-and-Move-It component of this program, Letter Name and Sound Instruction is a part of each lesson. It has been determined that instruction in phoneme awareness is more effective when it is combined with instruction in letter sound correspondences. If this is the first time that you are working on letter names and sounds with your children, it will help the children if you explain that all letters have both a name and a sound. This is an abstract concept, and many children don't understand this idea until it has been presented many times and with many examples.

Throughout the program we will be introducing several games to provide students with additional practice opportunities for mastery of letter sound correspondences. This component of the lesson will vary in length, depending on whether a game is introduced. In general, you will spend about 5-10 minutes on this portion of the lesson.

In this manual, we have chosen to introduce only eight letters. This does not mean that we think these are the only letter sounds the children need to learn. The eight sounds we have chosen include two short vowels and six consonants. Numerous phonetically regular consonant-vowel-consonant words can be made using these letters. Thus, knowledge of these sounds will be particularly useful when children start to read words at the end of this program.

Phonological Awareness Practice

The activities suggested in this component of each lesson provide practice in a range of simple phonological awareness tasks.

Sound Categorization by Rhyme

The first activity to be introduced is Sound Categorization by Rhyme (adapted from Bradley & Bryant, 1983). That is, the children are going to practice grouping together words that rhyme. The same materials and the game description that appear in Lesson 1 will be used later in the program for Sound Categorization by Initial Sound.

To play the game, there are some things you need to prepare ahead of time. You might want to photocopy and laminate the Sound Categorization by Rhyme and Initial Sound cards from the Materials Section in this manual. Each page can be cut into four separate picture cards, grouped into the recommended sets, and filed by set in a recipe box. Index tabs can be used to identify each set and to separate the rhyming sets from the sets based on initial sounds. The list of recommended sets can be found on each page of cards. We have included duplicates of some pictures because some of the picture cards will be used for grouping words by rhyme and by initial sound.