Phonological Awareness

Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of individual speech sounds, or phonemes. A child's skill in phonological and phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.

Phonological awareness is a critical early literacy skill that helps kids recognize and work with the sounds of spoken language.

Phonological awareness is made up of a group of skills. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, counting the number of syllables in a name, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, and identifying the syllables in a word. The most sophisticated — and last to develop — is called phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Manipulating the sounds in words includes blending, stretching, or otherwise changing words. Children can demonstrate phonemic awareness in several ways, including:

recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound
("Bell, bike, and boy all have /b/ at the beginning.")
isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word
("The beginning sound of dog is /d/." "The ending sound of sit is /t/.")
combining, or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word
("/m/, /a/, /p/ – map.")
breaking, or segmenting a word into its separate sounds
("up – /u/, /p/.")

Sometimes phonemic awareness is confused with phonics; they are two different yet interrelated skills.

Phonemic awareness refers to spoken language — the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words.

Phonics refers to the alphabetic principle — the idea that letters represent the sounds of spoken language.

Children who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of spoken words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to letters when they see them in written words.

Activities for students

Create word families. Use refrigerator magnets to spell a word ending (-ap). Have your child put other letters in front of the word ending to create rhyming words (tap, cap, map, lap).
Fill in the blank. Read children's poems aloud and leave off the final word, having your child fill in the missing rhyming word:

"Run, run, as fast as you can,

You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread ____."

Make TV time a time for learning. Choose programs with a focus on reading. Check out PBS' Between the Lions, for children ages 4-7, or Reading Rainbow, for ages 4-8.

Some good poetry books for kids:

Sing to the Sun, by Ashley Bryan
In the Eyes of a Cat: Japanese Poetry, by Demi
This Big Sky, by Pat Mora
The Random House Book of Poetry for Children, edited by Jack Prelutsky
A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Any book by Dr. Seuss!

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