By Stacey Masliansky, M.Ed., Director of Teaching and Learning

Before I knew I wanted to be a teacher, I knew I wanted to work with children. As a young girl, I spent countless hours caring for my dolls and later, as the oldest sibling, helping to care for my younger brothers. My first babysitting job at 11 solidified my passion, which grew through high school and college as I worked at a daycare center and as a camp counselor. I was fascinated by the challenge of meeting children’s needs and watching them grow.

As a classroom teacher and private practitioner, I’ve learned how crucial it is to understand students’ strengths and weaknesses to effectively support their learning. Although I began as a high school English teacher, my teacher education program did not prepare me to teach reading. It wasn’t until I trained in the Slant System™ that I truly learned how to teach this fundamental skill.

Before I knew better, many of the struggling readers in my high school classroom seemed either lazy or indifferent to the joy of making deep connections with words on a page. In hindsight, I realize that for many of these students, their reluctance stemmed from an inability to effortlessly blend phonograms into meaningful syllables, words, and sentences. It breaks my heart to think of how I failed these students—but as Maya Angelou wisely said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”

 Today, we know that for students with a word reading disability, such as dyslexia, activities that develop phoneme blending, segmenting, and manipulation are crucial. These activities help activate the phonological processor in the brain, an essential component for efficient reading.

This understanding has shaped my approach to teaching. Knowing that advanced phonemic awareness skills of manipulation—like substituting and deleting phonemes—are critical for reading development, I’ve made these activities a core part of every structured literacy lesson. The beauty of phonemic awareness activities is their simplicity: all you need is a list of words (and sometimes a dry erase board) to create engaging and impactful activities.

Integrating Advanced Phonemic Awareness into Daily Lessons

As educators, we know that phonemic awareness is the foundation of reading success. But did you know that advanced phonemic awareness activities can take your students’ literacy skills to the next level? These activities, which focus on more complex tasks such as phoneme substitution and deletion are crucial for developing the deep word-level reading skills that students need to become fluent readers.

The Slant System™ offers a wealth of resources that can help you easily incorporate advanced phonemic awareness into your structured literacy lessons. For example, our existing word lists can be adapted for a variety of engaging activities:

• Phoneme Substitution: Use word lists to challenge students to substitute one phoneme for another, creating new words. For instance, have them change the /m/ in “mat” to /s/ to make “sat.”
• Phoneme Deletion: Encourage students  to practice phoneme deletion by removing sounds from words. Ask them what word remains when the /s/ is removed from “stop” (answer: “top”).

These activities not only reinforce phonemic awareness but also deepen students’ understanding of how sounds work in words, which is essential for reading and spelling success.

Explore Free Slant System™ Resources

To make it even easier to integrate these activities into your daily lessons, we’ve created a variety of free resources, games, and activities available on our website. These tools are designed to be used with our word lists and can be seamlessly incorporated into your structured literacy instruction.

We encourage you to explore these resources and start incorporating advanced phonemic awareness activities into your lessons today. By doing so, you’ll help your scholars develop the strong reading foundation they need to succeed.

Visit the Slant System™ website now to access these freebies and take your literacy lessons to the next level!