A kindergarten activity uses picture cards with three boxes for the number of sounds in each word, guiding students to place a token for each sound. This activity develops which phonemic awareness skill?

• A. Phoneme deletion
• B. Phoneme categorization
• C. Phoneme segmentation
• D. Phoneme substitution

Answer: (C)

Phoneme segmentation is the key concept here. In this activity, students listen to a word and use three boxes to show how many individual sounds—or phonemes—are in that word, placing a token for each sound. That hands-on process makes it clear that spoken words are made up of discrete sounds, which they can count and map to symbols later. This direct practice of breaking a word into its separate sounds builds the essential skill of segmentation, a foundational step for decoding and later blending. It’s not about removing sounds, changing sounds, or sorting words by shared features, which would be phoneme deletion, substitution, or categorization.