Phonological Awareness Goals for Speech Therapy
- NAME will tap out each syllable of a given word in 4 out of 5 opportunities across 3 sessions.
- NAME will name a word that rhymes with a given word in 3 out of 5 opportunities across 3 sessions given no support.
- Given a CVC word and a familiar visual, NAME will identify the initial, medial, and final phonemes in 4 out 5 opportunities across 3 sessions.
- NAME will substitute, delete, and add phonemes to given words to form new words with 75% accuracy in 2 out of 3 consecutive sessions.
Read more about my goals here.
Phonological Awareness Resources
Here are my favorite resources that target phonological awareness:
Teaching Phonological Awareness Skills
Based on research, it appears that there’s likely only a very general order of difficulty of phonological awareness skills (Ukrainetz, 2015). Because of this, there is no need to wait to target more advanced skills. Students might be progressing on a variety of phonological awareness skills at the same time and might demonstrate scattered strengths and weak areas.
During phonological awareness instruction, the goal is to move the student towards blending and segmenting as quickly as possible, as those skills “contribute more to learning to read and spell well than any of the other activities under the phonological awareness umbrella” (National Reading Panel, 2000; Snider, 1995).
With that said, this is how I typically address and break up phonological skills so that I can easily differentiate questions to different students based on their skill level and goal areas:
I often use phonological awareness activities as a warm-up in my session schedule. I adapt the questions I ask each student based on their language level and frame it like a “daily sound puzzle” that we’re trying to solve! In general, my students have really enjoyed these quick questions and activities!
To support student success in these activities, I either provide objects that represent the sounds (blocks, cars, index cards, etc…) or a visual like the one below:
Last, depending on the student, I might show the written form of the sound or word to increase letter/sound knowledge and literacy skills.
I love targeting speech sounds alongside phonological awareness activities by using word lists intended to elicit specific sounds. Here’s an example of my reference sheet for “sh”:
For more ideas on how I might teach phonological awareness skills, click here to learn more about targeting sound-level skills in speech therapy.
Phonological Awareness in Context
While phonological awareness skills are skills I am okay with teaching out of context (unlike other foundational language skills like vocabulary), you can also address these skills within the context of picture books and other themed materials.
To do this, I create calendars of daily, themed phonological awareness questions, activities, and calendars that use words that relate to the overall theme or story. I include this with all of my themed units in case you want an easy button for this!
Or, to purchase the calendars and reference lists that I use for the activities shown above, click here.
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