Segmenting phonemes is one of my favorite phonemic awareness skills to teach. Segmenting lends itself to interactive, multi sensory activities that get kids moving. Students can use their arms, legs, and even their head to help them conceptually understand segmenting sounds.
What is Segmenting?
Segmenting is the ability to say the individual sounds (phonemes) of a word said aloud. For example, if the word stated is hat, the student would be able to isolate and say each sound, /h/ /a/ /t/. Although this is a phonemic awareness skill, it is also very helpful in spelling. By mastering segmenting, students will be able to isolate sounds and apply the corresponding letter to spell words.
The goal with any phonemic awareness skill like segmenting is that the students are able to eventually do this automatically and effortlessly. There are times when a student may need more think-time due to processing differences and that is okay! You know your students best and it will be pretty noticeable when they have mastered segmenting and are ready to move on.
3 Segmenting Activities
1. Head, shoulders, and hips
I recommend using this activity if your students are just starting off learning how to segment phonemes. I enjoy having my students stand up and use their head, shoulders, and hips for segmenting words with 3 sounds (I usually start off with very simple consonant-vowel-consonant words with hard stops like ‘hat’ and ‘top’). Are you segmenting words with more sounds? Students can use their knees and toes, too! Once students get the hang of segmenting, you can turn on some music and practice while jamming out. Music always makes a huge difference and research says the brain learns better with music.
You can use the song below to practice segmenting while dancing along with your students. You can even watch it multiple times a day to review segmenting and as a warm-up for dictation activities.
2. Tapping
When students have gotten an understanding of segmenting using their head, shoulders, and hips, I like to move on to tapping sounds with our fingers. I like to have students tap their fingers on the table for each sound. When tapping a word, students tap with their index finger first and move towards their pinky. You can follow the same steps as the ‘head, shoulders, and hips’ activity above.
3. Tokens
A very popular way to practice segmenting is with the use of tokens to represent sounds. The idea is that each token represents one sound in the word. The teacher says the word, the students repeat the entire word, and then they place a token in front of them as they say each individual sound. I like to keep all of the tokens the same color in segmenting activities because we are not drawing attention to any particular sound like we do when we substitute sounds (a different phonemic awareness skill).
Traditionally, the tokens used are plain circles, but I like to mix it up and use a variety of tokens. Around Halloween time, I use felt pumpkins as tokens. In the month of February I use cut out hearts to get festive for V-Day. You can make it as fun as your heart desires! Another reason to love phonemic awareness.
The video below teaches segmenting by using actual images of the word! The mime in this video accidentally breaks objects (the word) and identifies each sound. It’s a really cute and unique way to help students truly understand what we are doing to a word when we segment.
FREEBIE: Get our FREE, no-prep segmenting worksheet here!
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Other Reads You May Enjoy:
https://dyslexiaida.org/building-phoneme-awareness-know-what-matters/
https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/blending_games
https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/elkonin_boxes