Phonemic Awareness
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of words. The levels of phonological awareness are, from simplest to most complex: syllables, onset–rime, and phonemes. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. We know that a student's skill in phonological awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty. Find out what parents and teachers can do to help children develop this critical literacy skill.
Games to Play
The following links are examples of games to play to practice phonological and phonemic awareness. Each game listed goes from simple to complex (top to bottom). Always remember that phonological and phonemic awareness is about sounds, not letters. We should only be using our ears, not adding in letters just yet! Use colored blocks or other manipulatives to represent sounds.
Rhyming Cars: Set up 2 ramps in your house. Have pictures of 2 items at the bottom of the ramps. Say a word and have the child zoom the car down the ramp that rhymes.
Word families: Word families are sets of words that rhyme. Start to build your family by giving your child the first word, for example, king. Then ask your child to name all the "kids" in the king family, such as: ring, sing, ding, wing. Challenge your child to also name words with blends at the beginning, such as hing, bring, sting, string. This will help your child hear patterns in words.
Word Counting Towers: Have your child build a tower with a song like "Twinkle, Twinkle" or another nursery rhyme. Place one block for each word.
Syllable Hunt: Have a basket of random materials. Have the numbers 1-4 laid out in order to sort. Students tap out the syllabes in the item and sort it under the correct category.
Syllable shopping: While at the grocery store, have your child tell you the syllables in different food names. Have them hold up a finger for each word part. For your second grader, look for three- and four-syllable words, such as pineapple = pine-ap-ple, three syllables, or watermelon =wa-ter-mel-on, four syllables.
I Spy Sounds: Play a game of i-Spy or go on a hunt to find things that begin, end, or have a middle sound that you say. Remember to focus on sounds, not letters!
Segmenting Button Flicks: Put some buttons on a tray and line them up for each sound heard in a word. Have the child repeat the word and then segment the sounds slowly by flicking the button for each sound.
Jump, skip, hop!: Create simple picture cards that you draw or cut out of magazines. Have your child, identify what's in the picture, and then break that word into its individual sounds. For example ship sh-i-p, three sounds (phonemes). Three sounds? You and your child do three jumping jacks, skips, or hops (followed by a high-five). You can also do this game outdoors without the cards, just call out simple words for your child.
Blending Parade: Put on a parade to blend sounds together. Start slowly to "march" out the sounds and then march faster to blend them together.
Lightning round: Try this fast-paced game at night. Grab a flashlight and with the lights out shine it on an object in the room. Ask your child to tell you how may syllables in that word has and to find a rhyming word (it can be a nonsense word!). With some words, you can extend the game and try sound swaps. Ask your child to tell you the new word if you change a sound from the beginning, middle, or end of the word. For example, what happens to chair if you change /ch/ to /b/ (bear).
Manipulation Switcharoo: Using blocks, bears, or other multi-colored objects, add, substitute, and delete phonemes in a word to make new words.
My sound is missing!: Take some words and ask your child what happens when some of the sounds go missing. For example, what happens to boat when I take away the /b/ sound (oat)? What happens to sweep when I take away the /s/ sound (weep)? What happens to teach when I take away the /ch/ sound (tea)? What happens to laughing when I take away the /ing/ sound (laugh)? Start with easy ones and see how challenging you can make them.
Swap it: Tell your child you're going to play "sound swap" with the word swap and create new words by changing out the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words. Ask your child what happens if you change the last sound from /p/ to /n/ — what's the new word (swan)? What if you swap the /w/ sound to /t/ or /h/ — what's the new word (stop, shop)? And what if you change the /a/ sound to /ee/ — what's the new word (sweet)? You can do play sound swap with lots of other words, for example: sheep > sweep, sweep > sweet, sheep > shop.