Phoneme Manipulation Activity for Phonemic Awareness

This phoneme manipulation activity is designed to boost budding readers’ phonemic awareness in a fun and engaging way. 

Students will select a task card and examine the two pictures, then identify where the sound changes in the word—whether it’s at the beginning, middle, or end. To demonstrate their answer, they’ll place a bone or marker on the corresponding section of the “long dog” visual, making the learning experience hands-on and interactive.

Phoneme Substitution Examples

This activity has students focusing on sounds getting changed at the beginning, middle and end of the word. By manipulating sounds at each position, students become more aware of how individual phonemes fit together to form words, which is a foundational skill for both reading and spelling. 

Here are a few examples of phoneme manipulation in action:

• Beginning sound manipulation – cat, change the/c/ to /m/ now you have mat.
• Middle sound manipulation – pen, change the /e/ to /i/ now you have pin.
• Ending sound manipulation – hat, change the /t/ to /m/ now you have ham.

Download this Phoneme Substitution Activity Today!

Use the dropdown menu to choose between the easy to print PDF version or the editable Google Slide version of this resource.

This resource was created by Lindsey Phillips, a teacher and a Teach Starter Collaborator. 

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