Description: Manipulating letters sounds is the process of using words that are familiar to students and using those words to find familiar patters as well as substitute individual phonemes. Manipulating phonemes in words can involve deleting a sound ("Take the/s/ off of stop"), adding a sound ("Add /f/ to the beginning of lip"), or substituting a sound ("Change map to mop"). These tasks are more difficult than blending and segmenting sounds. The ability to manipulate phonemes within a word (delete or change sounds) is a phonemic awareness skill. It is better to start with beginning simple sounds as these are the easiest to distinguish and then increase complexity as the child’s skills advance.
Picture: The picture is an example of an activity used in the classroom to manipulate letters and sounds. These students were given the letters h,o,m,g,p,c,b, and t along with the task of using these letters to construct words.
Video: The video is a catchy way of informing students that every letter makes a sound. Because this strategy involves adding, deleting, or substituting sounds. Providing the students with this background knowledge will enable them to make further connections as they work on manipulating letters and sounds.
Literacy
Perhaps you are working with a group of beginning readers and are comparing word families. You might prepare a series of manipulation activities similar to this: "Write the word car." Now change car to cart. Now change cart to fart. Now change fart to fat. Now change fat to cat. Now change cat to sat. and so forth...
Science
To better familiarize students with the academic content related to a unit they can be encouraged to sound out any vocabulary words. The instructor can prep beforehand to see if any words share similar letter and sound construction then model those similarities to their students.
History
For older students a lesson could be made on the history of human language and how sounds were originally constructed by the earliest human to how they have evolved in now modern times.
Writing
Magnetic letters or magnetic letter tiles would work well in implementing this strategy. After students practice forming words with the magnetic letters you can instruct them to put the words in print.
Resources: 1) Jennings, J., Caldwell, J., & Lerner, J. (2014). Comprehension of Informational Text. In Reading Problems: Assessment and Teaching Strategies (7th ed., p. 315). Boston, Massachusetts: Pearson.
2) "LeapFrog Letter Factory ABC Song | Learn Letters and Sounds." YouTube. YouTube, 19 Apr. 2011. Web. 08 Nov. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsPbIjENEWs>.