Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge have been identified in several research studies as the two key indicators of how well children will master beginning reading skills during the first two years in school.

Letter knowledge is the ability to identify a letter by name and the corresponding sound.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate phonemes, which are the smallest part of a spoken language.

Activities to support phonemic awareness:

• 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/.")

Nursery Rhymes are a great way to immerse our littlest learners into the wonderful world of letters, sounds, words, and stories! We encourage you to read, sing, listen, and recite nurser rhymes as a fun way to engage our phonics professors!

Be sure to check out Mother Goose on Netflix for fun and interactive access to nursery rhymes! For an added bonus, turn on the closed captioning to activate multiple modalities of learning.