Hold up three fingers and point to each one showing each finger represents a sound. In the video you can hear I kept taking away that first A. Pick 5 or 6 three letter words or sounds a it’s easy if you do VCV at first, vowel, consonant, vowel, and continuously remove the SAME sound for each set of words. To do this, start by doing it WITH your kid for at least a few days before letting them figure it out on their own. You want readers who know how to work with, and play with, language! These types of activities seem short and simple, but they have huge payoffs with emerging readers! You want kids who analyze, question, and decipher. Why is phonics instruction SO important with young readers? Why not just focus on sight words and memorizing letter sounds? Because you want CRITICAL readers. This is definitely a harder skill to be able to remove a sound and say what’s left - it’s great higher level thinking for kids who have a good grasp of beginning and ending sounds already. Having visual cues with your hands helps A LOT and they will often mimic what you do with their own hands.
I try to make it fun and act like I’m a letter robber and they need to either guess what I took, or tell me what I left behind. Isolating and removing sounds when practicing phonics is a HUGE skill for emerging readers. 👇🏼Keep reading to see how you can do this at home.
