About this activity
Twelve words with /ch/ in the middle: teacher, kitchen, ketchup, matches, peaches, catcher, pitcher, watching, hatching, lunches, benches, munching. Medial position is harder than it looks — the sound sits between two vowels with no pause around it, so it has to be produced inside the flow of a word rather than at a boundary.
How to use it in a session
Break the word at the sound to start: tea-cher, kit-chen. Splitting it gives the child a final /ch/ and an initial /ch/, both of which are usually easier, and then you rejoin them. Ketchup and catcher are the pair worth doing together because they differ only in the vowel and the ending, which makes the target part obvious. Six minutes covers the twelve at word level.
What to listen for
Listen for the sound weakening rather than substituting. In medial position the commonest error is not a clean substitution but a softened, half-produced affricate — teasher rather than teacher — that is easy to accept as correct on a fast pass. Watch the unstressed syllable: matches and benches both put the /ch/ at the end of the stressed syllable, and that is generally easier than watching or munching, where it starts the unstressed one.
Carrying it home
Kitchen, teacher, lunches and ketchup come up in most days without arranging anything. Ask the family to listen at one predictable moment rather than continuously — the kitchen is a good place for a word that happens to be kitchen.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- First through fourth, and it usually comes after initial /ch/ is stable.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all twelve cards play with no account.
- Why practise medial position separately?
- Because it is a different motor task. Position effects are real: a child can be accurate at the start of a word and inaccurate in the middle, and practising only initial words does not fix the middle.