Reddit reviews Creative Teaching Phonemic Awareness: Pre-K - 2nd Grade (Playing with Sounds to Strengthen Beginning Reading Skills)

I think what you're looking to teach is phonemics. Phonemics--as I was taught-- means being able to hear the individual sounds in a word. For example, when you asked if they can think of a word starting with /d/ (a letter between slashes, like /d/, means the sound that letter makes, rather than the letter itself).

The first step of this is being able to isolate a specific sound when hearing it, eg, "What's the first sound in 'cat'?" You'll be surprised how difficult this is. Younger or less literate students hear all words as a big, single sound, and it's very hard for them to isolate one sound. Initial sounds are easiest, ending sounds are second easiest, and middle sounds are most challenging.

After being able to hear and isolate the individual sounds in a word, the next step is blending. This means that you can say three sounds, for example, "/c/ /a/ /t/," and the student is able to blend those sounds together to make a word: "cat." Again, do not underestimate how challenging this can be. Keep it to very simple words with three phonemes (a phoneme is a unit of sound, so words like dog, mat, can, tin, leaf, tree, bit, etc).

Last step is segmenting, which means you say the word, "cat," and the student can break it into individual sounds: "/c/ /a/ /t/." This is very hard.

These skills, plus letter-sound correspondence (knowing that D says /d/) are the fundamentals of literacy. Since your students already know the alphabet and the sounds the letters make, they have an advantage. Teach them phonemics as I described above, and they'll be able to sound out simple words.

I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Phonemic-Awareness-Playing-Strengthen-Beginning/dp/1574712314. It's got some very useful, concise information, and a lot of suggestions for games and activities. This http://www.amazon.com/Quick-Reading-Activities-Struggling-Students/dp/1607020548/ref=pd_sim_b_12?ie=UTF8&refRID=1GKX3H47ABESYV4F68TS is another book I've used, although I didn't like it quite as much as the first one. This http://more.starfall.com/info/downloads.php is another awesome resource. Scroll down to "Level I: Cut-Up/Take-Home Books" for really simple short readers focusing on specific sounds. I had the published versions of these readers, and my kids loved them. You can download them for free here-- and let the kids color them themselves!

Good luck! I did this kind of teaching for two years in the Peace Corps, and you'll be surprised how these very basic skills can develop literacy really quickly.

Here is the mobile version of your link