Fly Away with Sounds! Free Learning to Read Printable

I realize Big Brother is young and while I am not "pushing" him to read, I do try to encourage him!  He does great memorizing sight words and knows his letters and sounds, yet he is still reluctant to go further than that.

I picked up a book at the library called: "Wow! I'm Reading: Fun Activities to Make Reading Happen"  by Jill Frankel Hauser and tweaked one of the activities a bit to go along with our airplane theme during our row of "The Glorious Flight" (more on that in another post!).

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This activity dealt with segmenting a word into phonemes, ie. "hot = h-o-t."  However, you could also adapt this activity for your student learning to read word families, too!

LFirst I drew an airplane and made three large circles-- one in the front, middle, and at the end of the plane.  I gave Big Brother a target sound to listen for and he was to put the Little People farmer (don't laugh, that's all I had in front of me at the time!) in in the right "seat"-- did the farmer sit in the front, middle, or at the back of the plane... 

I practiced with target sounds /d/, /g/, and /b/:

Target sound /d/:

dog (beginning)

mad (end)

puddle (middle).

This frustrated him  a bit, especially when I said the target sound in the middle of a word.  He kept second guessing himself and moving the farmer all around.

Where is the farmer going to sit?

I also used the plane to practice word families.  I think it was a good activity and one we'll do again.

Workin' on word families

Update 11/19/13: I've created a free printable so that you can use this activity, too!  And don't worry, it's a lot cuter than my hand-drawn airplane ; )  Click on the picture to get your printable.  If you know anyone else that could use this, please send them here! : )