Today is Tuesday of our 30 Days of Reading Fun for Beginning Readers series and on Tuesdays we explore phonemic awareness concepts. Identifying and isolating individual sounds in words can sometimes be difficult for beginning readers. This activity aims to make what would normally be an auditory process into something more concrete and tangible without using letters (in keeping with true phonemic awareness).

I created this school bus printable for this activity. I asked my daughter to put the unifix cube at the front of the bus for the beginning sound, in the middle of the bus for the middle sound, and at the back of the bus for the ending sound.

I introduced each word and then said, “Where is the sound /__/ in the word _______?”

For example, I gave my daughter the cube and put the school bus in front of her. I said, “Where is the sound /d/ in the word ‘dog’?” She then would move the cube to the front of the bus because the /d/ sound is at the beginning of the word. We continued this with several of the simple CVC words I included in the printable.

(And please excuse my yucky looking copy of the printable…my printer is acting up!)