Phonemic Awareness Activities Through Dance for K-2 Classes

Imagine your class standing up, ready to move. An instrumental track starts and you call out, "OK everyone, welcome to our phoneme of the week class." Every step to the beat comes with the sound of the week, said out loud and in time, and the whole room is moving with it.

So what are phonemic awareness activities that get students moving? Phonemic awareness is oral work with the individual sounds in words. The NSW Department of Education describes phonological awareness as all about what you are hearing and saying, and a phoneme as the smallest unit of sound in speech (NSW Department of Education). In a phoneme dance, you play an instrumental track and students say the sound of the week in time with their moves. From there, the activity extends into letter-sound work: words that use the sound shown on screen, or spelling out a word each time students hit a corner of a box step. Syllables can get one step each. It works as a brain break with sound practice built in.

These ideas come from Adam Lock, a primary school teacher and independent NDIS disability support provider. Adam is a primary school relief teacher in South Australia who loves art and brings it into the classroom at every opportunity. Integrating the Arts in English (K-6) is built on activities Adam has run in English lessons, and the dance module opens with a promise: "you will be surprised how you can integrate your English content into a bit of dance."

The ideas

1. Start with an instrumental track.Adam searches YouTube for something to dance to and says, "I recommend always typing the word instrumental when doing this activity." Lyrics compete with the sound you're focusing on. Adam also says you can use a song whose lyrics feature your focus sound, with students doing a set move every time they hear it.
2. Say the sound in time with the moves.Adam sums up the activity this way: "the core of it is getting students to dance whilst saying in time" the content focus, in this case the phoneme. Students say the sound of the week on the beat as they move.
3. Ask for words that use the sound.Once the class has the beat, Adam asks whether they can all come up with words that use the sound. Expect a few silly ones along the way.
4. Put the words on the screen.This step brings in letters. Matching the dance with a screen that shows the words in text lets you model each one, and Adam says this helps students develop the link between letters and sounds.
5. Spell out a word on a box step.Students walk in the shape of a box, and every time they hit a corner of the box step, they spell out a word (Adam's example is SIT). Like the words on screen, this is letter-sound work.
6. Give each syllable its own step.Adam sees syllables as a perfect fit for this kind of dancing, because "each step can be a different syllable." The steps line up with the natural beats of words.

Integrating the Arts in English (K-6)Start this course

Why dance suits sound work

Adam points out that rhythm is built into dancing. It's all about timing. When students have to say words in time with the beat and the movement, the timing gives them support for their speech, and they get it in a fun way. Adam describes dance as a rhythmic vessel for vocabulary: students can move in time with words, count, and read words together while they build phonemic awareness and an understanding of sound and letter relationships.

Adam keeps the dance at the centre. Students say the focus sound while they do whatever movement you're working on, so their speech and their body move together. Saying it while standing still would make it more of a music activity. Adam says this builds fluency and coordination in movement and speech at the same time.

A brain break with sound practice built in

Adam introduces the phoneme dance as a warm-up for an English lesson with a movement brain break feel to it. Adam notes that a lot of the brain breaks teachers put on from YouTube or run themselves are already dance-based: jump up and down, hop in time, follow the directions on the screen. The phoneme dance keeps that movement and adds the sound of the week.

Adam rates it highly: "This always goes off in classrooms from my experience." Everyone moves and enjoys it. Students who were restless are up and moving, and in Adam's words it becomes "a brain break that develops dance skills" alongside English skills.

Adam also reminds teachers that arts activities don't need a full 50-minute lesson. When you'd usually run a brain break game, you can swap in one of these instead.

Pitching it for your class

Adam is a firm believer in not putting students in boxes by year level, because any class has a spread of abilities. Some students will be more advanced and some will need an extra hand. The advice is to set the complexity of each activity to suit the students in front of you.

For younger years, Adam suggests keeping the dance requirements simple, with keyword moves like clap, jump or hop. The phoneme dance itself can grow with the class. You can make it as sophisticated as you want, and Adam suggests speeding things up whenever you feel the class needs more of a challenge.

Adam says to use all of these activities across all year levels. What changes is what you ask students to do. At the start of the course, Adam suggests the course suits all of primary, and even early childhood and secondary. This post looks at the phoneme dance with K-2 classes in mind, and that focus is ours.

You can also adapt the focus. Adam's phoneme dance can shift to whatever English content you're working on, so it stays relevant to where students are in their learning. A word hunt for a different starting sound works the same way.

How to use this in your classroom this week

• Find your track. Search YouTube for an instrumental song your class will want to move to, and add the word "instrumental" to the search.
• Open with Adam's line. Welcome students to the phoneme of the week class, then have them say the sound in time with the beat as they move.
• Add the screen. Display the words students come up with, so they see the letters that go with the sound they're saying.
• Try the box step or syllable steps. Walk a box and spell out a word each time students hit a corner, or take one step per syllable.
• Use it between lessons. Run it as a warm-up for English or in place of your usual brain break game.

Take it further with the arts in English

The phoneme dance is one small piece of Adam's dance module. In Integrating the Arts in English (K-6), Adam goes on to cover:

• a verb dance game that works as a warm-up, with action words called out in time to the music
• poetry dance reading, where one student reads a poem while a partner acts it out
• syllable steps and other dance ideas
• interpretive dance as storytelling, with students writing the story first
• modules on music, drama, visual arts and media arts in English, each with a demonstration activity
• how the activities align to both the English and the arts curriculum
• ideas for building these activities into a sequence of lessons that ends in a performance

For more on talk and listening in the early years, Classroom Conversations: Oral Language in the K-2 Classroom is a good next step. You'll find more courses for primary teachers in primary teacher PD.

Adam's parting request to every teacher is a simple one: "add art in every opportunity you can in English and the other learning areas."

HBWritten by Helen Bryant, Director of Education, ClassCover Learn. Helen has been teaching for over twelve years in both government and independent schools, across all stages from K-6.