Phonological awareness quick win

Hello and welcome to Episode 18 of the Triple R Teaching podcast! Today begins a five-part quick win series in which we share useful tips or strategies for teaching the Big 5: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Today we're going to look at phonological awareness, and our quick win tip is to make sure that you use, "I Do, We Do, You Do," when teaching phonological awareness skills.

I think that very often we just ask students to DO the thing versus actually teaching them to do it. By "the thing," I mean things like rhyming, or clapping syllables, or phoneme isolation, and I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else. So I want to talk today about how to use the "I Do, We Do, You Do" model, which is really important when giving explicit instruction.

Let's try this with rhyming. I Do: You could say, "I wonder what rhymes with cat? Let's try bat. Bat, cat. Do these words sound the same at the end? Yes. That means they rhyme. Let me try another pair. Say, play. Do those words rhyme?"

Then you do a We Do: "Okay, now it's your turn. What's a word that rhymes with fin? No, fit isn't quite right, because the endings aren't the same. Fin, fit. Not the same. What's a word that ends the same as fin? Yes. Chin ends the same, so fin and chin rhyme."

Then the You Do could be where they play a rhyming game in which they say whether the words rhyme or they produce their own rhymes. The You Do is going to be something they do independently or with partners at a center.

Let's do another "I Do, We Do, You Do" example with phoneme isolation.

I Do could sound like this, "I wonder if men and wet have the same middle sound? /m/-/ĕ/-/n/. /w/-/ĕ/-/t/. Those words both have /ĕ/ in the middle, don't they? They sound the same in the middle. I wonder if cat and fish have the same middle sound? /k/-/ă/-/t/. /f/-/ĭ/-/sh/. Those words have the middle sounds /ă/ and /ĭ/, so those are not the same."

Then We Do, "Okay, your turn! The first word is bus. Can you think of another word that has the same middle sound? What's the middle sound in bus? /b/-/ŭ/-/s/. /ŭ/. Okay. Another word that has the same sound in the middle. Okay, another word that has /ŭ/ in the middle. What could that be?"

"Cup."

"Yes, that word has the same middle sound."

You Do is where you have them at a center, maybe where they compare middle sounds and color yes or no on their answer sheet to tell you if the two pictures have the same middle sound.

That was our quick win for phonological awareness. Use the "I Do, We Do, You Do" model when teaching skills. Next week, we're going to take a look at phonics. You can find the show notes for this episode at themeasuredmom.com/episode18.