• Students will learn to hear and manipulate the sound in words.
• Students will be able to isolate the first sound in a word, the last sound in a word, and all the sounds in a word. (p – a – t)

• Varying academic levels: uses whole group discussion to ensure full student participation
• Visual learners: uses Elkonin boxes with chips or beans as visual aids
• Auditory learners: provides opportunity for discussion of each word to aid in the comprehension of the sounds in a word
• Kinesthetic learners: allows students to experience word sounds through tactile means

• Explain to students that they are going to hear words and they need to take apart the word into individual sounds. Then they will need to put the sounds back together.

  

Examples:

cat = ccc aaa ttt = cat

Eric = E rr ii cc = Eric

• Allow students to use pipe cleaners to help them experience word sounds through tactile means.
• Have students hold the pipe cleaners with their fingers at the center of the pipe cleaner.  Then ask them to slide their fingers out toward the ends as they slowly say each sound of the word. If pipe cleaners are not available, you can have students pretend that they are stretching play dough with their fingers. 
• Demonstrate the proper way to use the pipe cleaners before asking the class to try.

• Explain to students that you will say a word. You would like for them to repeat the word, stretch it out, and say it again. “Say it fast, say it slow, say it fast.”

Examples:

Darla = DD a rr ll aa = Darla

Pot = pp oo tt = pot

• Give students 6-8 words to practice a day as time permits.

• Use Elkonin boxes and two sided chips or beans to practice sound identification.
• Have students push a chip or bean into a Elkonin box when they hear a sound.

• Each star in the picture above, represents a chip or a bean. Given the word dog, a student would push a chip into the first box for the sound dd, push a chip into the second box for the sound ooo, and then push a chip into the third box for the sound gg. For students that have letter-sound correspondence, they can write the letters in the boxes.

• For a daily assessment ask students to individually segment a word given by you. 
• Yopp-Singer Test of Phonemic Segmentation can be administered to each student after eight weeks. Visit http://teams.lacoe.edu/reading/assessments/yopp.html for instructions on how to administer the test. 

• Explain to the students that phonemic segmentation will aid in reading words that they do not know. They can “sound out” what they are reading by going from the whole word to parts of the word.