How to Incorporate Phonological Awareness Skills into Your Speech Therapy Practice

Confession…when I first started working in the schools, I was so overwhelmed with everything that a school based SLP is responsible for, that I never really took phonological awareness skills into consideration for my students. I also didn't really feel confident that I knew much about it or how important it was. Fast forward a few years and I got to attend a conference about the language and reading connection, where I was introduced to the famous Scarborough's Reading Rope, and it sort of rocked my world. Of course I always knew that language was important for reading, but I didn't know enough. I started doing as much professional development on literacy as it relates to speech and language as I could, reading books, and fell in love with using books in my therapy.

And when we jump to the past few years, I've been super interested in the research related to speech sound disorders (SSD) and their relationship with reading development. In a study by Tambyraja, Farquharson, and Justice (2020), they found that school age children had increased risk of reading difficulties if they had a SSD. The link to the phonological system is undeniable, so therefore it is an area that SLPs need to invest in learning about to best serve students. Today I wanted to share some resources with you that I have found helpful in this area of practice, hopefully you will find them useful too!

Professional Resources

There are TONS of resources out there that you can get information from, these are just a few that I have used personally and have found to be great resources on the topic.

• Phonological Awareness, Second Edition: From Research to Practice by Gail T. Gillon is a wonderful book that includes evidence based strategies for targeting phonological awareness and how to support students who are ELL, have reading/language disorders, and complex communication needs.
• The Intensive Phonological Awareness (IPA) Program by Schuele, Murphy, & Moats is a tested Tier 2 intervention program that is evidence based to improve phonological awareness in primary grades.
• Phonological Awareness Training Program: A Speech Language Pathologist’s Tool for Training Teachers is a book I have just ordered, which is designed to help SLPs provide education to teachers about phonological awareness skills development and instruction.
• The Informed SLP is a membership site that shares research summaries and has many references for phonological awareness
• Children's Literacy and Speech Sound (CLaSS) Lab at FSU is run by my friend Dr. Kelly Farquharson and she openly shares her research and resources related to this topic.

Free Screeners

When we are evaluating students for SSD or language, we should also be looking at their current level of phonological skills. Often you can do this with the classroom teacher, as they are usually progress monitoring these skills on a regular basis, but if this is not the case there are free resources you can use.

• Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) by David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D. © 2003, 2010, 2016 is a free printable tool that you can use to quickly assess students' phonological skills
• Access to Literacy Assessment System (ATLAS) is an online phonological awareness measure that allows you to asses the skills of children without using any spoken responses, which can be very important for students with speech and language difficulties. You can create a free account on their site to access the assessment.

Picture Books

When using picture books, you can easily find ways to incorporate phonological awareness, but there are some that are my favorite! Using these books you can easily target rhyming identification and production, phoneme manipulation and more!

• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Martin Jr & Archambault is a crowd favorite for working on letter identification and includes rhyming text. I love the idea of creating your own coconut tree to use letters to create words or working on sounds. This could be a whole group activity or individually students create their own.
• I Spy A to Z by Marzollo and Wick is a fun book that includes pictures for each letter of the alphabet, so students can identify the beginning letters and sounds based on the pictures.
• Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook by Shel Silverstein is the cutest book for working on phoneme manipulation, you can use it as a model to create your own initial or final letter swaps and see what you come up with.
• Hooway for Wodney Wat by Helen Lester is a love of mine, especially for our students working on /r/, but it's a great demonstration of phoneme substitutions with the grapheme presented.
• Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy E. Shaw is classic that features tons of long e words that you can target rhyming, phoneme manipulation, or identification with.
• The Berenstain's B Book by Stan & Jan Berenstain was my son's favorite book as a kid – he never got tired of it! This one would be good to read and then have students generate words that start with /b/, then make substitutions to change the word. You could also choose another letter and create a copycat story!

Other Materials

And if all of the above isn't enough, I've got a few things in my TPT shop that you might love…

• Phonological Awareness Frogs includes activities to target rhyming, initial sound identification, ending sound identification, and counting syllables.
• Beginning Sounds these 46 digital task cards on the BOOM Learning website cover beginning sounds for syllables and words. Students will move the bus down the road to its parking space, practicing the letter name/sound on the way, then they will blend the letters to make the word.
• Winter Mystery Pictures this bundle of digital task cards on the BOOM Learning website are for phonological skills with a fun winter theme! Students answer the questions, then reveal a piece of a mystery picture. When they correctly answer all of the questions, they will see the entire picture. Targets rhyming, initial sound identification, ending sound identification, and syllable identification.
• Syllable Awareness Activities A total of 88 cards to target multisyllabic words, including pictures! There are 2 suggested activity uses, plus two student sheets that can be used for independent work or as a carryover assignment.
• Multisyllabic Word Game includes one open ended game board and 47 stimulus cards to target 2, 3, and 4 syllable words.

How do you incorporate phonological awareness skills into practice? Leave a comment and let us know!