The Big 5 A teacher's guide to literacy in the classroom
What is Phonemic Awareness?
All words are made up of individual sounds, each representing a letter or group of letters; these sounds are called phonemes. A person's ability to hear, identify, and manipulate these sounds is the basis of phonemic awareness. A mastery of phonemic awareness marks the beginning stages of a successful reader.
Phonological Awareness: the bigger picture
Before understanding phonemic awareness, you need to grasp the concept of phonological
awareness. Phonological awareness also implies oral language, but refers to recognizing and
maniulating the larger parts of words such as syllables, onset & rime, and rhymes. Once students
have mastered phonological awareness, they are ready to move into phonemic awareness and
further break words down into their smallest sounds, or phonemes.
What do I need to know about teaching phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness develops naturally in part with exposure to print and spoken language, but direct instruction is also a necessity. Despite it's importance, no more than 20 hours of direct instruction should be taught over the school year. The building blocks of reading, phonemic awareness is a skill that should be taught early on - grades PreK through 2nd grade (and with struggling readers at any level).
While phonemic awareness is an oral language skill, the most effective methods of instruction connect phoneme manipulation to letters of the alphabet.
How do I teach phonemic awareness in my classroom?
There are many simple activities you can do with your students to practice with phonemes.
- Categorization (Which one does not belong? teacher: Band, book, or slam? Child: slam)
- Blending (Teacher: What word is /c/ /a/ /p/? Child: cap)
- Segmenting (Teacher: What are the sounds in pant? Child: /p/ /a/ /n/ /t/)
- Deletion (Teacher: Say 'black' without the /b/. Child: lack)
- Addition (Teacher: Add an 's' to the beginning of the word 'top'. Child: stop)
- Substituion (Teacher: The word is land. Change the /l/ to /h/. Child: hand)
Try not to overwhelm your students with these activities. Choose one or two to focus on (blending and segmenting are generally the most helpful) and use those to practice phoneme manipulation.
Elkonin Boxes (above) are a great way to help your students visualize phoneme manipulation. For each sound in a word, students move a counter into a box saying the sounds as they fill in the boxes, then saying the whole word.