When students who have had little formal schooling arrive in our secondary ELL classes, many teachers are caught a little flat-footed for a number of reasons. One of them is that many have not received training in phonics and phonemic awareness instructional strategies.

I was lucky enough to have gone through an credential program that prepared me for all K-12 grades, so I have some background, but I need periodic refreshers because I don’t necessarily have students facing those kinds of challenges every year.

I teach phonics inductively (see The Best Resources About Inductive Learning & Teaching), but I still many traditional follow-up activities to help students develop phonemic awareness.

Here are some good resources that secondary teachers can use to get them up to speed on what those activities might be (I’m adding them to The Best Articles & Sites For Teachers & Students To Learn About Phonics – by the way, you might also find The Best Online Resources For Teachers of Pre-Literate ELL’s & Those Not Literate In Their Home Language useful):

The Florida Center For Reading Research seems like a “mother lode” of sorts for ideas and printable resources. They have a seven-part series of phonemic awareness activities, including a zillion printables:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

The University of Pittsburgh has a nice summary of phonemic awareness activities – if a seven part series is too much for you 🙂

Phonics and Decoding is from ASCD.

How Now Brown Cow: Phoneme Awareness Activities is from Reading Rockets.

I have to admit I don’t do all of activities listed in the above resources, but one I definite do use a lot is onset-rime. Here are some other materials specifically on that topic:

Word families and Onset Rime: early literacy instruction with learners with CCN is from Jane Farrall.

Instructional Activities to Develop Phonological Awareness: Onset-rime and Phoneme is from Reading First in Virginia.