55 Chop Up a Message
Caroline Massaro
Strategy Overview
- Chop Up a Message is a phonological awareness activity that promotes students’ ability to identify sentence structure. Students learn that sentences are made up of words and words are made up of letters.
- An activity like Chop Up a Message is important to aid in students’ phonological awareness skills, because it promotes being able to identify parts of a sentence and how many words are in each part. Teachers can use this activity in the classroom as a small group station with students and the teacher. The teacher will demonstrate how to chop up a sentence using sentence strips to determine the parts of a sentence.
- This activity relates to research of the “Big 6” skills & competencies. When it comes to phonological awareness, students need to be able to “identify and manipulate sounds” (Lesaux & Carr, 2024, p. 3).
Strategy in Action
The teacher would take a small group of students to conduct the activity, Chop Up a Message. You will need sentence strips, scissors, and a white board to write down sentences. The teacher will plan a sentence with the students (silly sentences are a great engagement booster) and write it down on the board. The students will repeat the sentence out loud and start to identify the different parts of the sentence. They will then help “chop up” a sentence strip with the appropriate amount of pieces/words. In order to do so, students need to be able to break up each part of the sentence and recognize how many words they hear/see. This is a great hands-on activity for students to visually see how many parts make up a sentence!
Related Resources
Lesaux, N.K., Carr, K.C. (2024). Brief 1: Science of reading: What is it? New York State Education Department.
