We are bringing back the holiday phonological awareness cards because we LOVE the holidays. Hopefully, you can incorporate some holiday fun into your week leading up to the winter break.
This fun activity is meant to support syllable segmenting, phoneme segmenting, spelling, and written work. Here's why:
To become a good speller, a student needs to be able to break big words into smaller chunks. In order to do that, there are two steps.
The first step to effective spelling
Is dividing a word like pumpkin into syllables. Pump-Kin.
The next step to effective spelling
Break each syllable into individual sounds. /P/ /u/ /m/ /p/ and /k/ /i/ /n/. Before a student can pair letters to each of these sounds, they need to be able to break the word into its smallest pieces by sound. That's the goal of phonemic awareness (no letters necessary).
However, we also find that it's really important that students make this connection. So when creating these Elkonin boxes, we created some of the boxes to match the number of sounds.
Get this fun, free holiday activity >>>here<<<!
You can use this PA resource in two ways:
1. If you have students who are really struggling to learn how to segment, start here so they can start to understand how to break the words down.
2. If you have students doing well with phonemic awareness, use these boxes to have the student begin to pair the letter or letter group to the sound. This turns your phonemic awareness activity into a spelling activity.
Finally, we have students apply their knowledge to a connected text. In our lessons, this means requiring the student to complete a writing sample.
In this activity, we included a writing activity that helps students begin to put together appropriate syntax in their sentences: who/what, did what, why/how/when/where.
For struggling readers and writers, we often see that because there is so much struggle at the single-word level, we forget that writing is an incredibly complex task that requires phonological awareness, sound-to-letter pairing, syntax, and semantics.
By scaffolding these activities in this way, you work from the most basic writing task (spelling, which requires an understanding of how words break apart) to the most complex task (putting together a syntactically correct sentence).
Next Steps
Holiday activities can be a fun way to practice phonological awareness, but the real value comes when students can use those same skills in their everyday reading and writing. Helping students break words into syllables, hear the individual sounds, connect those sounds to letters, and apply what they know in their writing gives them a stronger foundation for spelling and literacy.
If you’d like to make this kind of practice a regular part of your instruction, our on-demand training, Building Phonological Awareness that Actually Supports Useful Skills, walks you through the key skill areas, how to choose what to target based on student needs, and how to build a simple, flexible routine into the reading instruction you’re already doing.
You’ll also receive the Phonological Awareness Toolkit, including an editable 10-Part PA Drill, task cards, games and activities for differentiating instruction, progress-monitoring records, grade-level benchmarks, and “Creating the PA Bridge” guides that connect phonological awareness to reading and spelling. The training includes a real-student demonstration, a one-hour PD certificate, and lifetime access to the training and materials, so you can keep using and adapting them long after the holiday decorations are packed away.