Effective phonemic awareness instruction teaches young children to notice, think about, and manipulate the shapes in spoken language.

Articulation and letter segmentation are two important components of this instruction. For the young child, one way to promote letter-sound correspondence is through the use of manipulatives.

For this activity we constructed the letter M using craft sticks with velcro attached at the ends.

Students maneuvered the sticks, using the velcro as an adhesive. Once completed, we practiced articulating the “m” sound with our mouths, noting the shape our mouths made, and the different sounds that we produced.