What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with individual sounds in words. While most people believe phonemic awareness and phonics are the same thing, they are NOT. Phonemic awareness is an essential component needed for a child to learn how to read. Even though phonemic awareness is essential, it also can be very difficult for a child.
What does research say about phonemic awareness?
Researchers believe that if children are to succeed in phonics, they must first be explicitly taught phonemic awareness. Researchers found that explicit and systematic phonemic awareness instruction helps a child learn to read, learn to spell, and instruction must be taught to manipulate phonemes using the letters of the alphabet.
| Armbruster, Bonnie B., et al. Putting Reading First: the Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read: Kindergarten through Grade 3. National Institute for Literacy, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, U.S. Dept. of Education, 2003. |
What strategies can I use to teach children phonemic awareness?
Finding one or two types of phoneme manipulation is the best strategy for teaching phonemic awareness. Although there are many strategies for teaching phonemic awareness, instruction should include blending and and segmenting phonemes in words. Phonemic awareness should always be very explicit about the connection between both phonemic awareness and reading so that students can not only manipulate the sounds orally, but also write the word with the manipulated phonemes.
| Armbruster, Bonnie B., et al. Putting Reading First: the Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read: Kindergarten through Grade 3. National Institute for Literacy, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, U.S. Dept. of Education, 2003. |
Below is a video of an instructional interactive video created by Jack Hartmann to use with your child to strengthen their phonemic awareness skills!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwOQvh_mJ4w