As stated by Lefkowitz 1980 Children are usually unaware that words are made up of individual sounds that can be produced in isolation. Sound b lending is an essential skill related to reading ability. It is up to teachers and parents to provide children with the concept of speech sounds.
It is easier to first start with words and syllables than individual sounds in words. Activities that involve counting the number of words in sentences or syllables in a word can be used as the beginning steps to introduce phonemes. Sometimes puppets can be used to represent different syllables and the child can either blend the syllables together to form a word or the child can provide the syllables, once he/she is a little more comfortable with the game. Clapping out syllables in words is a fun activity that can be done anywhere. Another portable game is counting out words on the fingers. This is an intriguing game because many times children will count out the number of syllables vs words and needs support to tell the difference. These skills shouldn’t stop being practiced once the child is reading but made a little harder to advance the child’s reading abilities.
Some games for introducing phonemes is for someone to give the first sound of a word, pause, and then give the second part of the word, then ask what the word is when the sounds are put together. For example, “/l/ pause /ight/ what is the word when put together? Light.” These little games can be played anywhere. Another game is to have letters written out on cards. Give the child a word and see if they can pick out which sound started the word. Even if they give the wrong spelling of the word, it is the sound that counts, so if they give the letter c for /k/ sound, it still counts as correct in the beginning stages. It is easiest to start with consents sounds as vowel sounds can sound very similar to each other. As the children strengthen this sound, end sounds can be used, then middle sounds.
Similar to the Orton-Gillingham method, coins can be used to pull down for each sound. For example: cat /k/ /a/ /t/. Each phoneme in cat would have a coin pulled down. This applies to letters that have the same sound as well. For example: phone /f/ /o/ /ne/. Each sound gets a coin, not each letter. Exact spelling of the words comes later in the process.