9 Practical Sound Discrimination Activities - Fun and Easy
Sound discrimination activities are important phonemic awareness activities. They teach students to listen and really pay attention. Discover nine practical auditory or sound discrimination games and activities for your kindergarten and preschool classroom in this blog post.
Hearing non-speech sounds is pretty easy for most students starting preschool and kindergarten. That’s if they are paying attention that is. Paying attention? Now that’s something we early childhood educators are constantly working on.
Sound discrimination activities are not only important for helping your students learn to pay attention, but they also develop phonemic awareness skills.
If you are looking for fun and practical ways to boost phonemic awareness skills and help your students pay attention - you will love this blog post!
I’ve got 9 of my best sound discrimination activities to share with you. My students LOVE these activities. I know they work. They are highly educational and engaging.
These 9 sound discrimination activities will help children sharpen their auditory skills by focusing on active listening.
Your students will become better listeners.
Sound or auditory discrimination is a literacy skill. It is part of phonological awareness. Before young children have any chance of learning to read and write, they must develop their phonological awareness.
What is phonological awareness?
Phonological awareness is an awareness of how words and syllables can be divided into smaller units. It includes three levels
syllable awareness
intra-syllable awareness
and phonemic awareness.
Syllable awareness involves recognising and separating syllables in words and combining syllables to form complete words.
Intra-syllable awareness focuses on the components known as onset and rime. This level includes blending sounds to create words, breaking down sounds within words, and making modifications like adding, removing, or altering sounds within words or sound clusters.
Phonemic awareness consists of four major skills and may sometimes be confused with teaching phonics.
What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is crucial for developing strong reading and writing skills. It involves hearing, identifying, and manipulating individual phonemes or sounds in words.
Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that make up words. It's important to note that phonemic awareness should not be confused with phonics instruction.
Phonics deals with teaching the relationships between letters and their corresponding sounds. Children can learn to manipulate sounds in speech even without prior knowledge of letters and phonics. Therefore, phonemic awareness instruction is separate from phonics instruction.
Phonemic awareness is not about recognizing letters. It really has nothing to do with alphabet letters (graphemes). It is about sounds. Understanding sounds in words.
To illustrate these concepts, let's look at the word fishing.
The word can be broken down into syllables: "fish" and "ing." Within these syllables, there are intra-syllables: "f" (onset) and "-ishing" (rime).
The individual phonemes in "fishing" are /f/i/sh/i/ng/.
It's important to understand that phonemes represent sounds, which may not always align one-to-one with letters or the word's spelling.
In fishing, there are 7 letters but only 5 phonemes.
By strengthening phonemic awareness skills, your students will become better equipped to decode and comprehend words. It is an important prerequisite for learning to read and write.
If you would like to learn more about phonemic awareness and how to effectively teach it, you will want to read this blog post: 12 Effective Strategies for Teaching Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is a crucial skill that kindergarten students need to master. If you want your students to meet their reading goals and achieve success in learning to read and write, it's essential to understand the most effective strategies for teaching this fundamental literacy skill.
What is Sound Discrimination?
Sound discrimination or Auditory discrimination is the ability to recognise similarities and differences between sounds. Sound discrimination relates to both speech and non-speech sounds.
The sounds could be nonspeech sounds like animal calls and musical instruments or they could be speech sounds like words, syllables and phonemes.
Sound discrimination is one of the essential skills that our kids need before they even start learning to read. It is super important because it helps kids break down words into their basic sound components. This ability improves their spelling and reading abilities.
Just like kids learn to see and recognise different things with their eyes (visual discrimination), they also need to learn to hear and distinguish various sounds before they can really start decoding and reading effectively.
Sound discrimination activities play a crucial role in any phonemic awareness program in kindergarten. Phonemic awareness activities are designed to help students distinguish and isolate different sounds, so sound discrimination activities should be your first step in teaching phonemic awareness.
Examples of Sound Discrimination
We have discovered that sound discrimination is about a child's ability to perceive and differentiate between sounds within phonemes, syllables, words, and the environment. Here are some examples of sound discrimination:
Animal Sounds: Children can engage in activities where they listen to and distinguish between different animal sounds. For instance, recognising a cow's moo versus a sheep's baa.
Musical Instruments: Sound discrimination can be fostered through exposure to musical instruments, like when children distinguish between the sound of piano keys being struck versus a guitar string being plucked or recognising the beat of drums compared to the melody of a flute.
Rhyming Games: Playing with rhyme helps children to distinguish the sound-structure of words. Nursery rhymes, rhyming poems and rhyming stories are loved by young children and they are the perfect resource to explore rhyme and rhythm.
Words and Sentences: Our language is made up of sentences of varying lengths. The words within these sentences are of different lengths, too. Becoming aware of this is the first step in understanding that oral language is made up of layers of smaller and smaller linguistic units.
Syllable Recognition: Another aspect of sound discrimination is recognising the number of syllables in a word. Children can count the syllables in words like butterfly (3 syllables) and apple (2 syllables). Or hear that banana has 3 syllables, while mango has 2.
Phonemic Sound Units: Sound discrimination also involves breaking down spoken words into their individual sound units, known as phonemes. An example of this type of auditory discrimination skill would be when children can hear and isolate phonemes.
Phoneme isolation is the skill where students can hear and isolate a sound at a word's beginning, middle, and end. These are often referred to as a word's initial, medial, and final sounds.
An example of this is when students can hear the difference between the initial sounds in cat and bat. Identifying the similarity in the ending sounds of hop and top or hearing the difference between the medial sounds in cat and cot.
Why Sound Discrimination Activities Are Important
In any early childhood classroom, one constant challenge is getting our students to pay attention. We are always working on teaching our kids to truly tune in and actively listen. Sound discrimination activities can help us. They sharpen phonemic awareness and help students develop their listening skills.
When your students participate in sound discrimination activities, they are learning not just about sounds but also the art of listening.
Students who participate in sound discrimination activities develop their ability to listen attentively to the sounds they encounter. They begin to understand their distinctions and similarities. This skill of discriminating between sounds is so important for fostering phonemic awareness because it helps students understand words consist of distinct sounds that can be rearranged and modified.
Just as importantly, sound discrimination activities contribute to students' auditory processing abilities. Strong auditory processing abilities are crucial for comprehending spoken language.
Through consistent practice in sound discrimination, students become more capable of recognising and analysing the sounds they hear. This ultimately leads to improvements in their reading and writing skills.
Auditory discrimination plays a pivotal role in enabling children to differentiate between the sounds of words that may appear similar. For instance, it helps children distinguish between the sounds of words like cow and now or cat and can.
Additionally, auditory discrimination assists children in identifying phonemes within words. For instance, children with good auditory discrimination skills can segment the word dog into its phonemes: /d/, /o/, and /g/. Segmenting and blending sounds are necessary skills for children learning to phonetically decode unfamiliar words.
However, it's worth noting that children who encounter difficulties with auditory discrimination or those with an auditory processing disorder may struggle to identify and differentiate between similar phonemes. This can pose challenges in understanding spoken language, learning to read, and following verbal instructions. More on that later.
The 5 Levels of Sound and Word Discrimination
To effectively develop phonemic awareness skills, it's important to understand the five progressive levels of sound and word discrimination. These levels build upon one another and can provide you with a comprehensive outline for developing phonemic awareness skills in your students.
Level 1: Environmental Sounds
At the foundational level, students begin by recognising and distinguishing between environmental sounds. Some sounds to include would be
animal noises
sounds from musical instruments
household sounds
nature sounds
Being able to discriminate environmental sounds sharpens listening skills and heightens awareness of the sounds in your surroundings. Get your students to listen to the ticking classroom clock or a bird chirping outside the window. As children advance, they can tackle more closely related sounds, like distinguishing between different voices or the differences between the sounds of a car and a motorbike.
Level 2: Words in Speech
After mastering environmental sound discrimination, children progress to the next stage. Here, they grasp the concept that spoken language consists of individual words. This understanding can be taught through rhyme and rhythm activities.
Try getting your students to clap, tap, and stomp to the rhythm of various rhymes. These types of sound discrimination activities should be quick, engaging, and active to ensure children stay motivated and listening.
Level 3: Syllables
Once children can distinguish individual words within a sentence, they learn to break them down into syllables.
Try giving your kids a six-word sentence like "The butterfly landed on a flower." A longer sentence like this can be segmented into ten syllables: The butt/er/fly land/ed on a flow/er.
Level 4: Rhyming Words
At this stage, students focus on identifying and generating rhyming words and recognising patterns in word families. To master this level, children should be able to produce rhymes for a given word.
If you give your students a simple to-rhyme word like cat, they should be able to provide words like sat, mat, hat, and rat.
Your students should also be able to differentiate between rhyming and non-rhyming words.
For more information on teaching rhyming words, make sure to check out this blog post: Teaching Rhyming Words
If you are looking for educational and fun rhyming activities, head to my store. I’ve got HEAPS of the rhyming activities there that I’ve used and had success with in my classroom.
Level 5: Individual Sounds in Words - Phonemes
In the final stage, children identify individual sounds within words. At this level, your students can recognise and manipulate the individual phonemes within words.
Students learn to identify initial, medial, and final sounds at this stage of sound discrimination. They also have the ability to substitute, add, or delete sounds to create new words. Being able to manipulate sounds and understand the intricate relationship between sounds and words are important concepts learned in this stage.
This level holds significant importance in kindergarten and grade one. These types of sound discrimination activities help students identify individual sounds in words and as a result, they can begin to decode words.
By incorporating these types of activities in your classroom, you will be providing your students with a comprehensive and effective approach to building those essential phonemic awareness skills in your students.
Sound Discrimination and the Science of Reading
These days, it seems any literacy activities you want to do in your classroom need to reference The Science of Reading. You can be assured auditory discrimination is an important and worthwhile skill to teach to your students, here’s an interesting research article related to the Science of Reading: Stimulating basic reading processes using auditory discrimination in depth.
It discusses the Auditory Discrimination in Depth Program (ADD Program), which has shown promising results in enhancing reading skills, particularly for kids facing reading difficulties.
This comprehensive study involved 281 participants from various age groups, spanning from children to adults. Each of the participants underwent 80 hours of ADD instruction. The primary objective was to assess the program's impact on their reading abilities.
The outcomes of this study were encouraging. Following the instruction, participants demonstrated significant improvements across multiple facets of reading. These included understanding the sounds of words, linking sounds to letters, word identification, spelling, and reading within context.
This research has implications for us as teachers of early literacy. It strongly suggests that if we want our students to become more proficient readers, we need to enhance their capacity to read with meaning by explicitly teaching about the sounds within words.
Another related study investigated the significance of auditory discrimination training in a first-grade classroom. The Developing Auditory Discrimination Skills in First Grade article discusses the importance of auditory discrimination skills in the context of first-grade education, particularly in reading. It states that distinguishing and recognising distinct sounds is crucial to early reading success.
The research, involving first-grade students, used The McKee Inventory of Phonetic Skills, Test One to measure the children's ability to distinguish between different sounds. While some students already possessed a baseline of auditory discrimination skills from exposure to spoken language, it was noted that further development of these skills is essential for proficient reading.
The study incorporated training programs focused on auditory discrimination. They included activities like rhyming words, distinguishing initial consonant sounds, and working with blends, both orally and in written form. The results demonstrated that most children responded positively to auditory discrimination instruction. Even those facing challenges such as hearing loss, emotional difficulties, or a disadvantaged socio-economic background showed progress.
The National Reading Panel suggests that the solution to auditory reading difficulties lies within the science of auditory therapy. Their unique approach combines auditory discrimination, sequencing, and processing therapy with phonemic awareness and phoneme manipulation.
In conclusion, these studies and programs help us see the crucial role of auditory discrimination skills in early reading development. There is compelling evidence for including auditory discrimination instruction in the early years literacy curriculum. It can help students establish a strong foundation in reading.
Auditory processing (the ability to hear and process speech sounds in the brain) is a key component of reading. Strong auditory processing skills are needed if students are expected to accurately match sounds to printed words.
How Do You Teach Speech Sound Discrimination?
So, you know sound discrimination is important, and you want to include practical lessons and activities in your literacy block, but how on earth do you teach it? Or, more importantly – what’s the most effective way to teach this phonemic awareness skill?
Put simply – make it engaging and educational.
Remember there's a natural progression in auditory discrimination skills.
Environmental Sounds: Recognising sounds from the environment is a skill that comes naturally when children are attentive.
Words in Speech: Understanding speech is made up of individual words.
Syllables: Analysing words by separating them into individual syllables.
Rhyme and Rhythm: Introducing children to the sounds of words through rhyme and rhythm activities.
Phonemes: Exploring the individual phonemes within words and getting familiar with the 44 speech sounds.
Follow this progression and ensure your sound discrimination lessons and activities meet children where they are at developmentally.
With these developmental levels in mind, here are my favourite sound discrimination activities.
9 Activities to Teach Sound Discrimination
Use these 9 engaging and educational sound discrimination activities to provide a solid literacy foundation for your young learners.
Your students will enhance their auditory discrimination skills and develop the ability to identify speech sounds, manipulate sounds, and blend phonemes to construct words.
1. Sound discrimination activity: Mindful Listening and Listening Games
A listening game will help introduce younger children to the art of listening actively, attentively and analytically. I refer to this type of listening as mindful listening.
Using listening games in a classroom is a great way to help your children become attentive listeners. It's the initial step in sound discrimination and sets the foundation for phonemic awareness.
While many educators dive straight into sound isolation, blending, and segmenting phonemes and then introducing corresponding letters (graphemes) early on, don't overlook the importance of the initial stages of sound discrimination and attention-building.
Imagine having a class full of attentive listeners – a teacher's dream come true! Mastering these skills in the early weeks of school can pave the way for a successful year of learning.
Mindful Listening Activity
For this sound discrimination activity, the children are asked to listen to many everyday sounds, such as birds outside the window, the noise of a fan turning or the sounds of the class next door.
With their eyes closed, they are asked to identify the sounds, to remember the order, and to locate their sources. This is mindful listening.
Mindful listening is a sound discrimination activity that helps students develop their ability to focus on specific sounds and distinguish between them. In this activity, students listen carefully to various sounds and identify the sounds they hear.
To practice mindful listening, you can use a variety of sound sources, such as animal sounds, musical instruments, or environmental noises.
Sometimes I like to use prerecorded sounds. I play the sounds for my students and ask them to identify the source of the sound. I like to encourage them to describe the sound using adjectives such as loud, soft, high-pitched, or low-pitched.
This activity enhances students' sound discrimination skills and promotes active listening and attention to detail. It can be done individually, in small groups or with the whole class. It’s a quick and easy sound discrimination activity that can be easily fit into your daily routine.
Getting students to pay attention is a constant challenge in any early childhood classroom. Sound discrimination activities do help.
Young children learn about sounds AND the art of listening when they participate in sound discrimination activities.
That’s why I created this PowerPoint activity.
I needed a way for my students to learn about sounds, see their differences, and learn to sequence them. I also wanted to introduce them to the language I’d be using when we started decoding. (first sound, middle sound, ending sound)
So if you’re interested in teaching your students how to hear the sounds in words, start with auditory discrimination. Auditory or sound discrimination is the secret to helping your students identify the sounds or phonemes within words.
There are 60 teaching slides guiding students through the process of identifying, recalling and sequencing familiar environmental sounds in this listening activity.
At the very beginning of any good phonemic awareness program, students learn to recognise and distinguish between environmental sounds.
💚 Don’t expect your students to know how to blend and segment phonemes if they don’t have strong auditory processing skills.
Many early childhood teachers jump straight into blending and segmenting phonemes at the start of school. They wonder why their kids aren’t getting it. Please don’t overlook the importance of the initial stages of phonemic awareness - sound discrimination and attention-building.
Exploring Environmental Sounds
Take advantage of everyday situations, like a visit to the playground or walking through the school to visit the library. Encourage your students to identify and name all the different sounds they hear around them. This simple practice trains their ears to distinguish between various environmental sounds.
2. Sound discrimination activity: Rhyme and Rhythm
Rhyme and rhythm activities are excellent for developing phonemic awareness skills because they focus on recognising patterns in word sounds.
Rhyming words share the same ending sounds, and rhythm refers to the stress and timing of syllables within words.
You can start by reading rhyming books or poems aloud to engage students in rhyme and rhythm activities.
Want a list of age-appropriate rhyming books?
Head over to this blog post: 79 Rhyming Books for Kindergarten and Preschool
In this illustrated list of my favourite rhyming books (yes, there really are 79 of them!), there’s a strong focus on Australian authors and storylines. There are picture books depicting cultural diversity and inclusive education themes as well.
Ask your students to identify rhyming words and encourage them to develop their own rhyming words. My students get a lot of fun out of creating their own nonsense rhymes and words too.
You can also introduce clapping or tapping exercises to help students recognise words' rhythm and syllable stress.
Rhyme and rhythm activities make learning fun and engaging while providing valuable practice in recognising and manipulating sounds within words. These activities can be great warm-ups in language arts lessons or used as standalone exercises to reinforce phonemic awareness skills.
Rhyming SPLAT! - A Fun Rhyming Game
Rhyming SPLAT! is an exciting and engaging game that helps children learn about rhyming. It's simple to set up - all you need are some rhyming picture cards and two fly swats.
How to Play
Setup: Spread the rhyming picture cards face up on a table.
Gather Around: The children sit around the table with the teacher.
Listen and Ready: Two children are given a fly swat each. The teacher then says a word that rhymes with one of the picture cards on the table.
SPLAT the Rhyme: The children with the fly swats race to find and SPLAT the picture card that rhymes with the teacher's word. The first child to SPLAT the correct rhyming picture gets to keep their fly swat for another turn.
Pass and Continue: The other child hands their fly swat to the next child, and the game goes on.
Don't have rhyming picture cards? No problem!
You can download a free set of rhyming picture cards from my FREE resource library, perfect for playing Rhyming SPLAT! in your class.
You can do so many different games and activities with a simple set of rhyming picture cards. Another of our favourites is Find My Rhyme.
Find My Rhyme – A Quick and Easy Rhyming Activity
This activity is another one designed to develop the phonemic awareness skill of rhyming. This collaborative game teaches kids to identify and create rhyming pairs. You can use the same set of rhyming picture cards you used in Rhyming Splat for this activity as well.
How to Play
Divide into Groups: Split your students into two groups.
Distribute Rhyming Flashcards: Hand out one picture flashcard to each child in the first group. Then, give each child in the second group a flashcard that rhymes with one held by a child in the first group.
Match and Rhyme: Guide the children in both groups to interact and work together. Their goal is to find the child holding the matching flashcard that forms a rhyming pair with theirs.
Create Rhyming Pairs: Once they find their match, they should stand together to show they have successfully created a rhyming pair.
This fun activity promotes phonemic awareness and also encourages collaboration, communication and social skills. It’s a win-win!
Games and hands-on activities are a fun and effective way to teach rhyming. Young children love playing games so using them in your literacy block is always a good idea. It’s the perfect strategy for optimal engagement.
Want More Rhyming Ideas?
As you know, nothing beats hands-on learning to ensure the content and skills are mastered. If you liked these 2 rhyming activities, you will find heaps more like these in this blog post: 43 Rhyming Activities for Kindergarten
Yes! You read that correctly. This is one of my most popular blog posts. This blog post has 43 hands-on rhyming learning ideas and activities to implement in your classroom.
3. Sound discrimination activity: Words in Sentences
Without a doubt, learning how to read and write requires children to understand what is and what is not a word. Most children starting school have only a vague understanding of what words are.
We need to devote time to teaching the concept of a word to our young learners. Activities requiring students to analyse sentences and break them into their separate words are a necessary auditory discrimination skill.
First, we need to introduce the idea of sentences. I like to discuss this concept when we are reading picture books.
Another great opportunity for consolidating the concept of what makes a sentence is when we do picture talks.
Ask the students to decide if statements you make are a sentence or not by putting their thumbs up or down. If they identify a non-sentence, encourage them to turn it into a sentence.
When children are familiar with the concept of a sentence, you can move on to introducing the concept of a word.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is with this simple activity:
Counting Words – A Simple Phonemic Awareness Activity
Tell the students that you’re going to read them a sentence and they will need to repeat the sentence and count the words by putting up a finger on their hand for each word said.
Try to use simple 4 and 5 word sentences containing monosyllabic words. Here are some examples you can use to get you started.
Pam ran to her friends.
The dog likes to dig.
My cat is fat.
Plums are nice to eat.
When your students have mastered this most basic level of auditory discrimination, you can move on to longer sentences and sentences using polysyllabic words.
4. Sound discrimination activity: Syllable Clapping
Syllable clapping is a fun and interactive activity that helps students develop their ability to recognise and segment words into syllables. Syllables are the units of sound that make up words and can be identified by clapping or tapping out the beats in a word.
To practice syllable clapping, give your students a list of words and as you work through the list, ask them to clap or tap out the beats in each word. For example, the word banana has three syllables, so students would clap three times.
This activity helps students break down words into manageable chunks, making it easier for them to learn to decode and read unfamiliar words.
Syllable clapping strengthens phonemic awareness skills and improves students' decoding abilities and word recognition. Make it a regular part of your literacy lessons and reinforce syllable segmentation skills.
5. Sound discrimination activity: Sound Sorts
Sound sorts are a hands-on activity that helps students categorise words based on their sounds. In this activity, students are given a set of words or pictures and asked to sort them into groups based on specific sound patterns.
To conduct a sound-sort activity, provide students with word cards or picture cards. Remember, this is an oral activity, so don’t give them written words if you are working on phonemic awareness.
Ask them to listen to the sounds in each word and sort them into groups based on shared sounds. For example, words starting with the same sound, words ending with the same sound, or words with a specific vowel sound.
Sound sorts enhance sound discrimination skills and promote vocabulary development and spoken word analysis. Students learn to pay attention to the sounds within words and recognise common patterns, which in turn, strengthens their phonemic awareness.
Initial Sound Sorting - A Phonemic Awareness Activity
This beginning sound sorting activity is an excellent way to develop phonemic awareness in children. It focuses on recognising and categorising the beginning sounds in words. This is a great entry-level activity.
It requires a set of picture cards, each representing different sounds.
Preparation: Create sets of picture cards for different sounds. For example, one set for the /d/ sound could include cards with images of a dog, dig, duck, daisy, and desk. Another/b/ sound set might have cards depicting a baby, biscuit, brown, bear, and ball.
How to Play
Introduce Sounds: Start with only two sets of sounds (phonemes) that you have already taught your students.
Sort the Cards: Ask your students to sort these picture cards into groups based on their initial sounds.
Develop Skills: This activity teaches children to distinguish different initial sounds in words.
Teaching Tips
Gradual Complexity: Once students become proficient at sorting two sound sets, you can introduce more complex combinations with three or more sound sets.
Visual Clarity: Ensure the pictures on the cards are clear and easily recognisable to facilitate better understanding and engagement from the kids.
Want A Set of Sound Sorts Already Done for You?
These Initial Sounds Picture Sorts help develop phonemic awareness skills and alphabet letter-sound correspondence.
They are designed for beginning and emergent readers in kindergarten and preschool.
The set includes 26 alphabet letter labels. There are up to 12 easily recognised photos for each initial sound, a printable title cover label, a word list answer key, AND a bonus A4 alphabet poster. Oh, there are also 2 printable learning prompts in this comprehensive resource.
Picture sorts are a concrete activity that will help your students hear and identify beginning sounds in words.
You should only need to do these sorts a couple of times with your students before they learn the routine and will be able to do them independently or with a friend.
This resource allows for differentiation. You can easily individualise the activity by giving each child the sorts for letter sounds they need to learn
The picture cards contain real-life photos so your students can easily relate to them.
All 26 alphabet letter sounds are included in the sorts, each with up to 12 relatable sorting pictures for each sound. Some picture sort letter cards do not contain 12 pictures though. Some letters (like letters o, x, u, y and z) just don’t like to play the game and their initial sounds cannot be represented pictorially 12 times.
The Initial Sound Picture Sorts align with the Science of Reading research and develop phonological awareness skills.
By using this resource, you will be able to provide targeted instruction that meets essential literacy standards.
6. Sound discrimination activity: Odd one Out
The odd-one-out activity challenges students to identify the word that does not belong in a group based on its initial, medial or final sound. In this activity, students listen to a set of words and determine which word does not share the same sound pattern as the others.
To play the odd one out game, provide students with a group of words or pictures that share a common sound. Ask them to listen carefully to the words and identify the odd one out. For example, if the words are cat, bat, hat, and dog, the odd one out would be dog because it does not share the same ending sound.
This activity builds sound discrimination skills and encourages students to pay attention to the specific sounds within words. It promotes critical thinking and sound analysis because students must identify the distinguishing feature that sets the odd one out apart from the others.
Odd One Out - An Auditory Discrimination Activity
The Odd One Out activity is designed to develop auditory discrimination skills in young learners. It involves orally presenting a set of three words to children, where two words share the same initial sound, and one is different.
How to Play
Present Words: Say three words to the children, ensuring two have the same initial sound and one is different. For instance, say "cat, cup, dog."
Identify the Different Word: Students need to listen carefully and identify the word with a different initial sound from the others (in the example it would be dog).
Teaching Tips
Visual Reinforcement: After the oral activity, use sets of pictures on task cards or worksheets as a follow-up. This visual aid helps reinforce learning, introduces new vocabulary, and allows for independent practice.
Assessment Opportunity: As you play, you can assess the children's ability to recognise initial sounds in words. You’ll also have evidence of learning if you use a follow-up worksheet.
This exercise is not only effective for teaching auditory discrimination but also for enhancing vocabulary and listening skills.
7. Sound discrimination activity: Sound Bingo
Want an engaging group activity that has your kids begging to play over and over? You can’t go past Bingo. It’s a fun interactive game your students will love.
How to Play
Bingo Cards: Provide each student with a simple pictorial bingo card.
Play the Sounds: As the teacher, you will produce different sounds (like /m/, /s/, or /sh/).
Mark the Card: Students listen to the sound and then mark the corresponding picture representing that sound on their bingo card.
Teaching Tips
Add Excitement: Make Phoneme Bingo more engaging by adding competition, rewards, or teamwork elements. For instance, students can play in pairs or small groups.
Frequent Play: Incorporate Phoneme Bingo regularly in your classroom to reinforce learning.
Download My Done-For-You Phoneme Bingo Game
This game is a proven hit in our classroom and offers a fun, interactive way for your students to learn about phonemes. Phoneme Bingo is not just a game; it's an effective educational tool that makes learning about sounds enjoyable and memorable for students.
I designed this game to help build phonemic awareness skills in my students. It helps them to differentiate between sounds, letters and words. It’s such a great way to teach your early literacy students to blend and segment phonemes.
I cannot stress enough how much regular practice and repetition of these activities will help you effectively teach your students sound discrimination skills and enhance their phonemic awareness.
8. Sound discrimination activity: Magazine Search
I love this activity. We do it regularly in our classroom. It’s great for fine motor and scissor cutting skills too.
It’s simple but effective. The students search through a magazine to find pictures representing specific phonemes or sounds.
Here are some teaching tips and steps I recommend you follow:
Select the Phoneme: Choose a specific phoneme to focus on. For example, if you're working on the /s/ sound, explain to the kids that they need to find only pictures representing this sound.
Introduce the Activity: Explain to the children that they will search through magazines to find pictures with the targeted sound. Emphasise that the sound can be anywhere in the word, not just at the beginning. When they find a picture, they will cut it out, put glue on the back and then stick it onto a piece of cardboard to create a class poster or collage.
Provide Examples: Give the children examples of words containing the target phoneme. Demonstrate how to identify the sound by saying the word aloud and emphasising the specific sound. Encourage the children to listen carefully for that sound.
Model the Process: This step is optional. You probably only need to model how to do a magazine search the first couple of times you do one. You might need to model how to cut out a picture a few times though. (Maybe even 10068 times if you’re teaching preschool or kindergarten!)
Begin the activity by finding a picture with a word that contains the target sound. Share your discovery with the children, saying the word aloud and pointing out the sound they are searching for. Show them how to cut out the picture and how to put glue on the back.
Give out the Magazines: Give each child a magazine. Oh - and here’s a good tip – Make sure the magazines are appropriate for their age and contain a variety of pictures. Store catalogues are a great option if you’re short on magazines.
Support and Monitor: Walk around the room, providing support as needed. Encourage the children to ask questions or seek help if they are having trouble.
Discuss and Share: Once the children have found enough pictures for your chart, gather the children together to discuss their findings. Each child can take turns sharing the pictures they found and saying the word aloud. This is the perfect time for some impromptu phonemic awareness lessons about the target sound.
Reinforce Learning: As a concluding activity, make sure you display the poster in the classroom as a visual reminder of the target sound and to reinforce how clever they are of course!
This activity is great for developing kindergarteners' phonemic awareness skills and helps strengthen their ability to identify specific sounds within words.
9. Sound discrimination activity: Sound Scavenger Hunt
A Sound Scavenger Hunt is an interactive activity aimed at developing children’s understanding of specific sounds or phonemes. I like to target the group of sounds we are learning, such as /s/, /a/, /t/, /p/, /i/, /n/.
It encourages students to identify objects corresponding to these sounds and reinforces their grasp of beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words.
To play this fun game you will need to select the phoneme or group of phonemes you would like to focus on. I like to have a reference poster for the kids. The poster we created in the last activity: The Magazine Search is a good option.
How to Play
Scavenger Hunt: Ask students to find objects in the classroom that begin or end with the targeted sound. For example, a toy cat for the /t/ sound or a pencil for the /p/ sound.
Share and Explain: Children bring their selected objects to the meeting area and explain how their choices represent the specific sounds.
Reinforcement and Assessment: This activity reinforces phonemic awareness and provides an opportunity for teachers to assess their student’s skills.
Follow-up Activity: Create your own educational resources by encouraging the kids to draw their objects or take photos of them. These can be used to create picture cards or sound posters for future reference.
You could even use them for other sound discrimination games and activities. The kids love it when you use educational resources they have created. It’s the best way to ensure engagement and build student’s confidence too.
Five Teaching Tips to Help Overcome Common Sound Discrimination Difficulties in Kids
Children who struggle with sound discrimination may find it tricky to distinguish between words like sister and sitter or cat and cot.
In essence, they have difficulty noticing the subtle distinctions in word sounds.
This challenge can make it particularly tough for them to fully comprehend spoken language. This can be even more difficult in noisy environments like in our early years classrooms.
You already know auditory discrimination plays a pivotal role in language development so if we want our students to become proficient readers, we need to make sure they master the related skills. Issues with auditory discrimination can present obstacles for young readers.
Children who experience auditory discrimination difficulties often display a range of observable characteristics that can impact their learning and communication skills. Here are some behaviours to keep a look out for:
Difficulty Differentiating Similar Sounds: Children may struggle to distinguish between similar-sounding phonemes (like /b/ and /p/ or /m/ and /n/). This can affect their ability to understand spoken language and impact their reading and spelling skills.
Challenges in Following Oral Instructions: They might find it hard to follow spoken directions, especially if the instructions are lengthy or complex.
Mishearing Words: These children might often mishear words or confuse words that sound alike, leading to misunderstandings in communication.
Speech Delays or Articulation Issues: They may have speech delays or articulation issues because difficulty in hearing sounds correctly can affect their ability to produce those sounds.
Problems in Phonological Awareness: Difficulties in rhyming, segmenting, and blending sounds in words can sometimes be attributed to an auditory processing problem.
Struggles with Learning New Vocabulary: Learning and using new words and understanding the specific differences in similar words can be challenging due to their difficulties in processing auditory information.
Poor Listening Skills: They may find it particularly hard to focus on or process auditory information - especially in noisy settings where there's a lot of background noise.
Reliance on Visual Cues: Children with auditory discrimination difficulties might rely more on visual cues and body language to understand spoken language.
Inconsistent Response to Auditory Stimuli: They may not consistently respond to sounds or their name being called. In the classroom, this is sometimes mistaken for inattention or selective hearing.
Social Interaction Difficulties: Social skills can be affected because these children might find it hard to engage in conversations, especially in group settings.
It's important for educators to recognise these signs early so we can provide appropriate support and intervention. Intervention strategies might include
speech and language therapy
targeted phonemic awareness
targeted auditory processing activities
accommodations in the school environments to aid learning and communication
Auditory discrimination skills can vary.
Here are three valuable teaching tips to help you:
Accurate Pronunciation Matters: Ensure you are modelling and the children are using the correct pronunciation of sounds. For example, mistakenly teaching unvoiced sounds as voiced or continuous sounds as stop sounds can interfere with a young learner’s ability to distinguish between sounds effectively. For instance, the sound represented by 's' is /s/, not /suh/. Accurately teaching distinctions like these ensures your students have a solid foundation for auditory discrimination.
Make Sound Discrimination Fun: Your classroom sound discrimination activities should be fun and engaging. Include games and interactive aspects like the ones outlined in this blog post in your phonemic awareness lessons.
o Play Sound Bingo or What's that Sound?
o Go on mindful sound walks where they listen for and discuss the sounds they hear.
o Engage multiple senses during auditory discrimination activities by using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic elements to reinforce the learning process.
o Use manipulatives, sound cards, songs, and movement to make auditory discrimination interactive and memorable.
Gradual Progression: Start with simple and familiar sounds, gradually introducing more complex discriminations. Begin with environmental nonspeech sounds before moving on to traditional phonemic awareness lessons involving syllables, rhyme and the 44 different speech sounds. Ensure ample practice and repetition at each stage before advancing to more intricate discriminations.
Most children can overcome developmental auditory discrimination challenges by incorporating these strategies in a supportive learning environment.
Do you have Students Struggling with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD)?
No matter what you try, some children will repeatedly struggle to recognise and discriminate sounds. This is concerning and could point to an auditory processing disorder (APD).
Children facing this challenge may have difficulty breaking down words into distinguishable sounds or phonemes and may also demonstrate difficulties with word sequences.
Seek Evaluation and Assistance
If you suspect you have a student with auditory discrimination difficulties linked to APD, it's essential to seek a professional assessment. A student with APD, while relatively rare, will require extra support in the classroom.
Understanding APD
In most individuals, distinguishing between sounds is an automatic process. However, those with APD experience a malfunction that prevents them from discriminating between phonemes. Kids with APD are typically not hearing impaired. They struggle with detecting the subtleties in word sounds.
Exploring Potential Causes and Early Intervention
The exact causes of APD are not fully understood, but factors like low birth weight, lead poisoning, recurrent ear infections, and other health issues have been associated with the disorder. Some research suggests there’s a potential gender difference. APD affects about 5% of school-age children.
Early intervention is crucial.
Diagnosing and addressing auditory discrimination difficulties in children at a young age can prevent long-term challenges in various aspects of their lives, both in and out of school. Auditory discrimination skills are essential for all facets of a child's development, so timely treatment is essential.
From mindful listening to scavenger hunts, this blog post's 9 sound discrimination activities provide practical ideas to engage and teach young learners. By focusing on speech and nonspeech sounds, these activities help students develop their auditory discrimination skills to eventually become better readers and writers.
Remember to use activities that target each of the five progressive levels of sound discrimination. By providing a comprehensive phonemic awareness program and practising these activities regularly, you can create a classroom environment that fosters a love for language and empowers students to become confident and successful readers and writers… and the added bonus? Your kids will actually start really listening to you 😉