Help Your Child Read Better With Phoneme Segmentation Activities & Worksheets
What is Segmenting?
It is one aspect of demonstrating phonemic awareness where the child, student, or learner is given one word, and then says all the individual sounds of that word. In short, it's "breaking up" the word into its individual component sounds. For example, we have the word "bat", to segment it, we would have the 3 separate sounds of:
- /b/
- /a/
- /t/
Why is this important? The knowledge and ability to distinguish each individual unit of sound helps the young learner understand the concept that all these individual sounds combine together to say the complete word. It teaches the child that by breaking up the words to individual sounds, we can "figure out" (decode) what the printed text is saying.
When teaching young children to read (or anyone at any age), the development of phonemic awareness (PA) is an absolutely critical component. Without it, you cannot learn to read effectively. The wonderful thing about PA is that this is an amazingly simple concept that you can even help 1 to 2 year old children develop. That's not hype or exaggeration, as I've helped my children develop very early PA at just 1.5 years old, and they were all reading phonetically at age 2.
Phonemic Segmentation Worksheets
We have prepared 2 different worksheets for practicing phoneme segmentation. They are provided in downloadable Adobe PDF format below. Click the image icon to download file.
(For personal use only)
I'll briefly explain how to use these worksheets. For the activities provided, you will find a set of images with words. For example, in the first sheet, you have:
- bat
- ant
- fist
- hammer
- jump
- lips
Each row contains several empty boxes for the child to write down the individual sounds they hear in the word provided. Simply use slashes / / to denote the sound. So as the 1st example shows, for the word bat, there are 3 sounds of /b/, /a/, and /t/. Continuing on, the word "ant" has 3 sounds of /a/, /n/, and /t/.
It is important to help the child "hear" and "distinguish" all of the individual sounds of a word.
