The Science of Reading Simplified
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You know those moments when you’re teaching phonemic awareness and you think, “There has to be a way to make this click for my kids”? I had one of those moments last week working with a struggling reader named Maya. We were practicing deleting and substituting sounds, and she just wasn’t getting it. Then I tried something that changed everything – but let me back up a bit first.
When we talk about deleting and substituting sounds, we’re really just playing with words. That’s it! Think of it like those sliding puzzle games where you move pieces around to make a picture. Except here, we’re moving sounds around to make new words.
I know, I know – when you read about “advanced phonemic awareness” in your teacher prep program (if it was even covered!), it probably sounded way more complicated than just deleting and substituting sounds. But here’s the thing: if you’ve ever sung “Apples and Bananas” with your kids, you’re already teaching sound substitution!
Let’s start with deletion. Imagine you’re sitting with a small group, and you say, “Let’s play detective! We’re going to make words disappear.” Here’s how I introduce it:
“Say ‘cup’… Now here’s the tricky part – say ‘cup’ without the /k/ sound.”
When they realize they’ve just made “up” – oh my goodness, the looks on their faces! One of my second graders actually jumped out of his chair last week when he figured it out. (Anyone else have those kiddos who just can’t contain their excitement?)
Once they’ve got that basic idea, you can start playing around:
Now, for substitution – this is where it gets really playful. I call it “sound swapping” with my kids. Remember Maya, who I mentioned earlier? She was struggling until I brought out what I call my “sound sliding door.” It’s literally just two Post-it notes that slide past each other, but when we used it to physically swap sounds in words, something clicked.
Try these with your students:
(Quick confession: sometimes I make sound effects when we swap letters. My third graders pretend to be embarrassed, but they always join in!)
Here’s a real life example of the importance of manipulating sounds from my intervention group last week: We were reading, and one of my students pronounced ‘down’ like ‘own.’ Sound familiar? This is where all that practice with deleting and substituting really pays off. As students start to learn that certain spelling patterns can make more than one sound, they need to develop some mental flexibility as they decode. Marnie Ginsberg refers to this concept as “set for variability.”
Because we’d been playing with sounds, she caught herself and said, “That doesn’t make sense,” tried the other sound of ‘ow’, and recognized that it was a real word that made sense in the sentence.
Movement Makes It Stick: We literally “pull off” sounds for deletion and “swap” sounds for substitution. This not only gets them engaged, but helps me to monitor participation and check for understanding
Partner Power: I pair up my kids and let them be “sound coaches” for each other. The confidence boost when they help their partner? Priceless.
Keep It Light: Sometimes we have “silly sound day” where we practice with funny voices. Because why not? Learning should be fun!
Celebrate the Small Wins: When a student gets even part of a sound manipulation right, we celebrate. Whenever I give feedback to students, I start by telling them what they got right and then tell them what they need to fix. This helps to minimize feelings of frustration and prevents them from guessing because they can anchor to the part that they already got right.
While deleting and substituting phonemes are important phonemic awareness skills, there’s an ongoing discussion in the literacy community about whether all students need to master them. These skills, often called “advanced phonemic awareness” (a term popularized by David Kilpatrick), are certainly valuable – but Kilpatrick himself suggests a more nuanced approach.
According to his research, once students can successfully blend and segment phonemes, they can develop these more advanced skills naturally through regular reading and writing activities.
Rather than requiring all students to master deleting and substituting in isolation, Kilpatrick recommends focusing these specific practice activities on students who show phonological deficits. It’s worth noting that research in this area is still evolving – as Timothy Shanahan points out, we need more studies to fully understand the benefits of deleting and substituting sounds, particularly for older struggling readers. The key takeaway is that while these skills are important, they don’t necessarily require intensive, isolated practice for every student.
Start small, keep it playful, and remember – every little sound game that practices deleting and substituting is building those reading muscles. And hey, if something doesn’t work? Try something else! That’s what teaching is all about, right? Some days our sound lessons will be amazing, and some days… well, let’s just say there’s always tomorrow! The important thing is that we keep making these skills feel doable and fun for our kids.
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Phoneme segmentation is the ability to break a spoken word apart into its separate sounds and say each one in order. It’s the encoding skill, the one a child leans on to spell, because writing a word she’s never seen means first hearing the sounds inside it and then matching each sound to a letter.
Phonemic awareness skills are the specific abilities a child uses to hear and work with individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. There are four that matter most, they build on each other in order, and knowing which one a student has reached tells you where reading instruction should pick up.
Phonological awareness is the broad ability to hear and work with the sound structures of spoken language: words, syllables, rhyme, and individual sounds. Phonemic awareness is one skill within that umbrella, hearing and manipulating the individual sounds (phonemes), and it’s the hardest and last to develop. The difference matters because a child can be strong at the easy, early levels and still be missing the phoneme-level skill decoding depends on.
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