Which activity helps children identify individual sounds in a word?

The activity that specifically helps children identify individual sounds in a word is phoneme isolation. This skill involves recognizing and isolating specific sounds within words, enhancing children's phonemic awareness. For example, when a child is asked to identify the first sound in the word "cat," they focus on the "c" sound. This foundational skill is essential for their reading development, as it enables them to break down words into their component sounds, improving their ability to decode and understand text.

Phoneme categorization, on the other hand, involves identifying which words in a set have the same sound, while phoneme manipulation requires changing sounds in a word to create a new word. Lastly, phoneme segmentation focuses on breaking a word into its individual sounds but is more about dividing rather than identifying each sound in isolation. Thus, phoneme isolation is the most direct method for helping children focus on and identify individual sounds within words.