Liz Kane is passionate about literacy learning and supporting structured literacy in NZ schools. She has made a series of videos to support parents (teaching at home) and teachers. This video focus' on phonemic awareness and showing you how to blend and segment sounds in words. This is an essential skill for reading and spelling. She takes you through a simple activity you can do at home.

She uses a sound mat.  You can build this at home and use milk bottle tops, cards or counters with letter names on them.  Here is the link to the video.  

This is the key structure for the lesson:

• say the word - child repeats 'am'
• touch and say - touch and say each sound in the word 'a - m'
• build the word - use the counters/letters to build the word
• say each sound and slide to read the whole word ' a - m -  am'

As your child progresses you can move to 3 sounds - CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant).  If you are using bottle tops, try to use different colours for the vowels to help support your child. 

Please speak to your child's teacher if you have any questions around phonemic awareness.