Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is one of the most important skills to develop at a young age. These are the most advanced phonological awareness skills. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are broken up into sounds as well as the ability to manipulate those sounds. Equipped for Reading Success by David Kilpatrick is a great resource to have when assessing and teaching phonemic awareness. 

We want students to master the following skills:

• The ability to recognize initial and final sounds in words: What is the first sound in the word bat? /b/. What is the last sound in the word bat? /(t/)
• The ability to blend onset and rime: What is this word: /k/ /at/? (cat)
• The ability to blend phonemes: /b/ /a/ /t/. What is the word? (bat)
• The ability to segment phonemes: What sounds do you hear in the word pot? (/p/ /o/ /t/)
• The ability to delete phonemes: Say trip without /t/. (rip)
• The ability to add phonemes: Say /it/. Now add /s/ to the front. (sit)
• The ability to substitute phonemes: replace the first sound in make with /b/. (bake)

These skills start less complex and move into more complex. Using David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success is also a great tool! 

Here are some additional ideas!

• Sound Analysis:  Teacher states a word and asks students to remove or add sounds.  For example:  The word is hear.  If I take away the /h/, what is left?  “ear”.  I have “an.”  If I add /m/ to the beginning, what do I have? (man)
• Counting phonemes: Ask the students how many sounds they hear in a word before encoding it and even before teaching an irregular word.  
• Chaining phonemes using Tokens:  Making only one change at a time, have students use tokens to represent sounds.  For example: The teacher would give students tokens..one color to represent consonants and a different color to represent vowels.  The teacher starts by saying show me /b/. (S) shows one consonant token. Now show me /b/, /t/.  Show me /b/ /a/ /t/.  Etc. 

To learn more about phonological awareness, consider taking an IMSE Phonological Awareness course.