Test Objective 07

Question #1

A kindergarten teacher conducts a literacy activity with a small group of students. The teacher gives each student a piece of paper with three connected boxes drawn on it. Each box represents a phoneme in a three-letter word. The teacher says a word slowly, pronouncing each phoneme distinctly. As the students hear each phoneme, they move a marker into the corresponding box. This activity provides the students with practice in:

You answered

Correct Response: B

Sound segmentation activities require students to isolate each constituent sound in a word. Moving each marker into its own box to represent each sound encourages the students to associate one marker with one sound, thus laying a conceptual foundation for students’ later association of individual letters with their sounds.

This scenario refers to the use of a teaching tool called Elkonin Sound Boxes. They support young or struggling readers to develop phonemic awareness skills by helping them to better hear and manipulate the smallest units of sound in words.

Question #2

Phonological Awareness refers to the progressive range of skills that allow us to recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken language. Which of the following skills represents the most complex level of phonological awareness?

You answered

Correct Response: C

Segmenting individual sounds in words

Children’s phonological awareness skills follow a continuum of complexity. The most advanced level of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds, or phonemes, and the ability to manipulate those phonemes either by segmenting, blending, or changing individual phonemes within words to create new words.

Question #3

A kindergarten teacher sets up a literacy center with an activity that asks students to match pictures of objects with pictures of letters to correctly indicate the beginning sound. Which of the following is the teacher trying to develop in students through this center?

You answered

Correct Answer: D  

Phonemic Awareness skills are necessary for matching words or pictures with beginning sounds. 

Option A (phonics) is incorrect because it involves understanding how letters combined to make sounds and words. Students are ready for phonics instruction after they have acquired a strong foundation of phonemic awareness. 

Option B (Vocabulary), involves building children’s receptive and expressive vocabulary or word knowledge, which is not the goal of this activity. 

Option C (letter recognition) is incorrect because this activity is not focused primarily on children identifying letters.

Question #4

A second-grade teacher is teaching a vocabulary lesson that focuses on the similarities, differences, and uses of the words to, two and too.  This lesson is helping children learn about:

You answered

Correct Answer: B

Homophones are words that sound the same but are spelled differently, such as to, two, and too.