Teaching Segmenting Phonemes when Learning to Read

Learning to read and write go hand in hand. As children grow in reading, their writing improves and as they improve in writing, this too can transfer to their reading. This is similar to speaking and listening. As your child begins to learn to blend syllables and sounds into words, couple that with learning to segment words in their syllables and sounds. Segmenting is especially important when your little one wants to start writing words and sentences, but also strengthens their ability to blend and play with the sounds in words.

Think about segmenting as breaking the word into its parts. This is just like peeling apart an orange into it’s chunks. When working on segmenting, you give your child the word and ask them to tell you the parts or sounds of the word. This is actually the beginning of your child’s writing journey.

For younger readers, you will want to move systematically introduce phonemic awareness skills. Once the skill has been introduced, it is okay to work on multiple phonemic awareness skills at the same time. Many of these skills overlap and work together. However, if your child is just starting out, be sure they have a good understand of rhyme and blending before exploring segmenting too deeply.

Once you have introduced and played with segmenting syllables and sounds of words, the next phonemic awareness skills to focus on are manipulation and deletion. You child has been developing these skills while working on rhyming, blending and segmenting but we will target them in our next segment of the learning to read series.

Progression for Teaching Segmenting Skills

Segment is another large chunk of phonemic awareness. Not only does it lend itself to other phonemic awareness skills such as deletion and manipulation of sounds, but it is part of phonics and most beginning writing programs. Without segmenting skills, most children struggle to learn how to write since they will need to memorize every word they wish to produce. Yes, some words we need to memorize because these words do not follow the regular patterns of English. However, this is a small subsection of words. About 97% of words are decodable or able to sound out using phonics.

What does this mean for segmenting. Once your child masters oral segmenting, they can begin to focus on phonics skills. Combining the letters with segmenting opens up the writing world for your child. Once your child masters the most common sounds for English letters and combinations of letters (vowel teams, blends, digraphs), they will be able to write the majority of words in the English language.

Begin with Compound Words

Begin the same way you start with blending. Start by segmenting compound words that are in your child’s vocabulary. These should be words your child has heard and maybe even said before. In the beginning, work with compound words that have only two syllables to ease your child into this new skill.

To encourage segmenting ask your child to identify the two words that make up a compound word. Say, “Which words do you hear in football?” If they struggle, say, “I hear foot. What other word do you hear?” When practicing with your child, be sure to also prompt by giving the second word in a compound word. For example: in hotdog, say, “I hear dog. What other word do you hear?”

Some children pick up segmenting right away, others need much more practice. If your little one is struggling with segmenting compound words, don’t fret. You can provide a few examples and see if your reader picks up on the activity. If nothing else works, print out pictures of the two different words that make up compound words. Provide your child two pictures and see if they can point to the correct picture for the two words that make up the compound word. As your child grows their skills, increase the number of pictures you show.

Soon enough, your little one will be segmenting a variety of 2 syllable compound words. Then you can challenge them by including 3 and 4 syllable compound words and see if they can identify the two words.

Move onto Syllables

As your child grows in their ability to segment compound words, be sure to try three syllable or more words like: peanutbutter, butterfly, checkerboard, applesauce, everywhere, grandfather, and cheeseburger. If three syllable words are a little tricky, try segmenting two syllable words. For example, try words like table, mountain, walking, kitchen. Then move on to multisyllabic words, which are not compound words. These words include fantastic, terrible, trampoline, television, battery. Sometimes children get confused between word and syllable. They want to divide compound words into the two words and not the syllables.

The more comfortable your child becomes with segmenting words into syllables, the sooner you can move onto segmenting words into sounds. As a result of learning about syllables, children get ready to read and write those long words by chunking the word into parts.

How to Teach Segmenting Phonemes?

First Sounds

Once your child is pretty confident segmenting compound words and syllables, begin to let them identify the first sound in the word. “What is the first sound you hear in tag?” We loved using names and common objects and my little ones loved to ask me to identify the first sound in words too. This is a great strategy if your child is struggling with this skill. One example is to let them try to trick you. Then point out many different words that start with the same sound.

A little trick I used with my students was to play head, shoulders, knees and toes. For example, when they would say the first sound, they tap their head. First, if they are working on only segmenting into two parts, we only used our head and shoulders. In addition, as they learned to segment more sounds, head was first sound, shoulders second sound, knees third, and toes was the fourth sound. Usually children who can segment four sounds won’t need the motions anymore.

Words with 2 Sounds

Next, we move onto segmenting two sound words. Firstly, begin with words that start with a consonant because most consonants only make one sound, unlike our English vowels. Next, be sure to add some that begin with vowels as your child becomes more at ease with segmenting 2 sound words. Some examples include dough, say, tie, pay, my, he, shoe, and law. To help your child with segmenting, ask, “What sounds do you hear in pay?” Hopefully, they can say /p/ and /a/. If not, try providing one sound and see if they can give the other. “I hear /p/. ” After that, ask “what other sound do you hear?”

Words with More Sounds

Child who are confident with 2 sound words are ready for 3 and 4 sound words. Many children are able to state the sounds in words before they can blend sounds into words. So often times, segmenting may be further progressed then blending and may transfer over to helping your child develop those necessary blending skills for reading.

When your child can segment 3 and 4 sound words, feel free to challenge them by adding in the digraphs and blends. The blends can be segmented into the same sound at first, but should eventually be divided into each separate sound. So when you child is first learning, they may divide slant into /sl/ /a/ /nt/. Then, work towards saying all 5 sounds separately – /s/ /l/ /a/ /n/ /t/.

Activities to Teach Segmenting Phonemes

There are so many wonderful activities for teaching segmenting sounds for your little reader. For each of these, you can always vary the materials used for anything you have at home or your child enjoys.

I Spy Segmenting Game

One of our favorite activities to play when segmenting phonemes is an I Spy variation. To play this game, your child choose an object. Then they will tell you the sounds they hear. For example, “I spy something with the sounds /s/ /o/ /k/.” You would then guess what they see. In this example, your child saw a sock. For more novice learners, you may wish to limit the item chooses by picking a few items to work on. As your child grows, you can open this up to any object in their environment.

Segmenting with Movements

We love to add movements when segmenting words. You really can use anything for this, but having a visual is nice too. In the beginning, you may ask your child to jump out the different sounds they hear. For a word like may they would jump 2 times – one for each phoneme in the word. While a longer word like black would require 4 jumps.

When your child is getting ready to transfer these skills to writing, we love to use a more visual approach so they don’t forgot how many sounds they need to write down. We love to use beads on pipe cleaners to support writing. Simply add 10 pony beads onto a pipe cleaner. We prefer to use 5 beads of one color and then 5 beads of a second color to help children more easily see how many sounds are in the word. For each sound the child says, they move one bed on the pipe cleaner. This is a simple visual to double check that they didn’t miss any sounds.

Segmenting Sound Boxes and Segmenting Puzzles

We love to use sound boxes with segmenting too. You child says a word and then points to one box for each sound that they hear in the word. For children who need more than pointing, they can place a small toy or chip into a box each time they say a sound. As an extension of this activity, you can work with picture puzzles.

These are super easy to make and very helpful for kids. Find pictures of things your child loves (be sure to keep the words short in the beginning). Print out or draw pictures, then cut the pictures into the same number of pieces as sounds in the word. For example, shark would have 3 pieces /sh/ /ar/ /k/. Don’t worry about adding letters at this point. You could will put the pieces together and say one sound for each puzzle piece as they build the picture.

Hidden Picture Segmentation

If you happen to have a Highlights subscription, you will understand the joy of hidden picture or hidden object searches. We love to pair these with segmenting. When your child needs help finding a picture, they need to ask for help by saying the sounds in the word. So if they are looking for a lamp, they might ask, “Can you help me find a /l/ /a/ /mp/ or /l/ /a/ /m/ /p/, depending on their skill level. Besides working on segmenting, you are also developing your child’s observational skills and attention to detail too.

You could use this with blending too. This time cut off the key with the objects to find in the larger picture. You say the sounds in the word for the object your child should try to find. Now your child needs to blend the sounds to figure out what he should look for in the hidden picture.

Phoneme Sorts are Always Fun

For this activity, your child will need a set of pictures or objects to sort. We like to work to ensure our pictures and objects have between 2 and 4 sounds. Usually a group of 10 – 15 objects is perfect for your little ones attention. You will also need 3 baskets or separate areas. Label the baskets 2, 3, and 4. Have your reader pick up an object. They will say the sounds and then determine which basket to place the object into based on it’s number of sounds. For example, a cat toy would be placed into the basket labeled 3. On the other hand, a truck would be placed into the basket labeled 4.

These are the initial, early steps to reading and writing. If your child struggles with reading three and four letter words, take a step back to play with blending words. If your child struggles with writing these same words, really focus on segmenting words. Once your child becomes proficient with blending words, they are reading to practice with word cards and even in short books. As your child grows in segmenting words, they are ready to begin writing words on drawings to label objects or writing stories to share with others.

Don’t miss the next post in the learning to read series, Manipulation and Deletion. Manipulation and Deletion takes an in-depth look into how to help your child develop these phonemic awareness skills. If you enjoyed this post, drop of us comment below. We’d love to hear about your favorite segmenting activities. For more parenting tips, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.