Adding, deleting and swapping sounds
Orally manipulate phonemes in spoken words by adding, deleting and substituting initial, medial and final phonemes to make new words (phonological awareness)
Lesson
Set out your lesson
“Adding, deleting and swapping sounds is oral phonemic awareness: you change spoken words by adding, removing, or substituting sounds—not by reading spellings. /s/ + top → stop; slip without /s/ → lip; pin with /p/ changed to /t/ → tin. We stay in listening and speaking. Tokens may mark sound slots, but we do not turn this into a spelling lesson today.”
Bring to the table
- Quiet space for oral play (no print required)
- Optional: three paper tokens to stand for sounds in a spoken word (not letters to read)
Extra for the adult
Worked example. /s/ + top = stop; slip without /s/ = lip; pin → tin (first sound), pin → pan (middle sound), pin → pig (last sound); chip → ship. Changes are in speech sounds, not in written letters for this lesson.
Optional challenge. For Adding, deleting and swapping sounds, delete a sound from inside a cluster (for example smile without /m/) and substitute a medial vowel in a new word the child chooses. Optional: the child gives you one add, one delete, and one swap to follow.
What to notice. Keep one parent note quoting the oral prompts and the child’s spoken responses; note token support. A voice file is not needed. Print spellings alone are not evidence for this phonemic-awareness session. This samples a few items, not every phoneme pattern.
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Teaching approaches
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1 approach
Adding, deleting and swapping sounds is oral phonemic awareness: you change spoken words by adding, removing, or substituting sounds—not by reading spellings. /s/ + top → stop; slip without /s/ → lip; pin with /p/ changed to /t/ → tin. We stay in listening and speaking. Tokens may mark sound slots, but we do not turn this into a spelling lesson today.
Spend about 12 minutes orally adding, deleting, and substituting sounds in short spoken words, with optional tokens for sound slots, then checking one item of each kind.
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Learning resources
Extra practice links — they do not replace Gakuva’s teaching approach.
UF Literacy Institute · Practice link — not the full lesson
Phonemic Awareness
Before you open · source notes
Free UF activities for blending, segmenting, and manipulating spoken phonemes (including Robbie the Robot). Adult-led sound play, not a spelling quiz.
Free university page, no sign-in for these materials. An adult chooses the activity.
Before you openAsk the learner to blend or swap one sound in a spoken word from the page. Opening the page does not score phonemic awareness.
Opening this link does not save learning or assess mastery.
Source, access and review notes
University of Florida Literacy Institute page. An anonymous GET on 2026-11-11 returned HTTP 200 with no login or payment prompt for this URL. Some linked slides open in Google Docs/PowerPoint and may ask for a Google account to copy; the page itself is readable without signing in. UFLI Foundations printables on the toolbox are free to download; the paid Foundations manual is separate and was not purchased or rehosted. Advertising was not observed in the fetched HTML text; that is not an ad-free guarantee. Opening the link does not save practice or assess mastery. Link only; do not copy course packs into Gakuva.
UF Literacy Institute. “Phonemic Awareness.” University of Florida. External resource; Gakuva does not copy, host, embed, or redistribute it.
UF Literacy Institute materials — link only; follow the page’s posted terms
Check understanding
- Add a sound at the start or end of a word: /s/ + 'top' makes 'stop'; 'ten' + /t/ makes 'tent'
- Delete initial, medial and final sounds, including from inside a cluster: 'slip' without /s/ is 'lip', 'black' without /l/ is 'back', 'tent' without the last /t/ is 'ten'
- Substitute initial, medial and final sounds: change 'pin' to 'tin', 'pin' to 'pan', 'pin' to 'pig' and 'chip' to 'ship'
“If you ask your child to say 'slip' without the 's', or to change the middle sound of 'pin' to make 'pan', can they do it out loud?”
Curriculum record
- Type
- Procedural
- Subject
- English
- Domain
- Phonics & Word Reading
- Age range
- Ages 6–8
Standards