What Is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness comes under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in a word. It is very important for students to have this skills in order to do well later with phonics and higher level reading skills. Phonemic awareness teaches us to listen for and hear the individual sounds or phonemes in a word. PA helps students with spelling and writing later on. Time and time again when working with struggling readers, I have found going back and reteaching phonemic awareness skills improves their phonics, fluency and comprehension skills.
Phonemic awareness skills deal with the sounds in a word. When teaching these skills, you do not need to use printed words. In my classroom, I always use a multi sensory approach to teach reading. In Kindergarten, some of the students are ready for print, so my examples all include the use of letter erasers, magnetic erasers or some type of hands on learning.
What Are These Important Skills?
Phonemic Awareness Skills- Phoneme Isolation
Phoneme isolation is the ability to identify where a sound is in a word, or to identify what sound is in a given position in a word. What is the beginning sound? What sound do you hear in the beginning of the word? Where do you hear the /t/ in the word cat?
Phonemic Awareness Skills- Phoneme Blending
Phoneme blending is the ability to identify a word when hearing all of the phonemes of a word in isolation. If you show a student a picture of a cat, they name each phoneme /c/ /a/ /t/ and then are able to blend the sounds to say cat. This seems like a simple skill, however, many kindergartners and even first graders struggle with this. Phoneme blending needs to be explicitly taught and practiced. Some of my kinders can name the individual sounds but then blend it backwards, right to left. It has taken a lot of practice to get them to go back and blend the sounds left to right !
Phonemic Awareness Skills- Phoneme Segmentation
Phoneme segmentation is the ability to break words down into individual sounds. The student hears or sees the word ten and then breaks it down into the individual sounds /t/ /e/ /n/. This skill is very important when the students are learning to spell and write later on. Students who struggle with fluency may not have mastered phoneme segmentation and have trouble sounding out new words.
Phonemic Awareness Skills-Phoneme Deletion
Phoneme deletion is the ability to identify how a word sounds if one of the sounds is deleted or dropped. This skill is a little more difficult for some students. I try to make learning this skill fun for the little ones. Sometimes it takes a little creativity but it is worth the effort! This skill is important to help with decoding and when students have mastered it can help students decode with rapid automaticity.
Phoneme Substitution
Phoneme substitution is the ability to make a new word by changing any of the word’s phonemes. Phoneme manipulation ( deletion, substitution and addition) are all important skills for students to understand because it will help them see that words are combinations of different sounds or phonemes. Phoneme manipulation skills are not always easy for students, so they must be practiced and taught with explicit and direct instruction. This skill should be taught orally first and will also help with language development with younger students.
Phoneme Addition
Phoneme addition is the ability to add phonemes to a word to make a new word. In simple terms, it is adding a sound to a word to make a new word. For example, you would say to a student, what word do you hear if you add /s/ to lip ? This is a more advanced skill but a fun one! Students have fun when they realize they can make new words by adding letters.
Syllable Deletion
Syllable deletion is the ability to make a new word by taking away a syllable. You need to teach multisyllabic words first. This is a higher level skill and children must understand the concept of syllables and be able to identify syllables in a word.
Syllable Addition
Syllable addition is the ability to make a new word by adding a syllable to another word or syllable. Understanding syllables and being able to manipulate phonemes and syllables is so important for children to master. They are higher level skills and may take time for children to learn, however, once they are mastered, students will be able to decode and become fluent readers. Have fun and teach on ! You are training life long readers !
