Phones and Phonemes

Today we’ll learn what phonemes are through a fun word hunt!

 MATERIALS:

  • Scissors

  • Tape

  • List of words/pictures attached here

TIME ESTIMATED:

15 minutes

DIRECTIONS: 

  1. Print and cut out the list of words and photos.

  2. Have a guardian or friend hide each photo around the house or area.

  3. Once all of the words are hidden, go on a hunt around the space until you have found all 14 words!

  4. After collecting all of the words, arrange them on a table or other surface, and create pairs of words starting with the same phone.

THINK LIKE A SCIENTIST!

  1. What are the units of sound that make up words and how do we tell the difference between them?

  2. Can you think of any words that start with the same letter but not the same phoneme? (like knowledge and kangaroo).

  3. Is the “ch” sound made up of one or two phonemes?

  4. How many phonemes are there in your name?

HOW DOES IT WORK? 

This activity shows the concept of phonemes, which are the smallest units of meaningful sound used in languages. We use combinations of these phonemes every day to create words. Over 200 different sounds exist in languages across the world. Our job is to use them to communicate and make sense to others. We can identify these sounds from a very young age, but as we grow, we need to learn which ones are used in our language and how to tell them apart.

FURTHER EXPLORATION: 

By your age, though you may not know it, your brain has a really good grasp on telling apart the sounds you hear every day. However, you haven't reached your full ability yet. This activity is a fun way to practice telling whether sounds are different or the same. Learning about phones and phonemes is always helpful to readers and spellers. 

This game is also supposed to show how the spelling of words does not always tell us what their phonemes are. Phonemes are different from letters, and sometimes the same letter makes the same sound in different words, and other times it makes a different sound. Sometimes two words sound the same, but different letters are used to spell the same phoneme. We hope you have enjoyed the activity and learned something new!

Anticipated COncerns:

Students may struggle to comprehend phonemes, and thus may be unable to create the word pairs.

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