Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness instruction, when linked to systematic decoding and spelling instruction, is a key to preventing reading failure in children who come to school without these prerequisite skills. (Moats, 2012)

The Phonemic Awareness curricula are based on the curriculum developed by Dr. Heggerty.  The daily lessons consist of the same eight phonemic awareness:  Rhyming, Onset Fluency, Blending, Identifying Final or Medial Sounds, Segmenting, Adding Phonemes, Deleting Phonemes, and Substituting Phonemes.  Students have daily opportunities to practice letter names and sounds and repeating sentences and nursing rhymes during Language Awareness activities.  There are 4 variables that represent the early literacy skills that had significant predictive relationships with literacy development which are found in this curriculum:  alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming (RAN) of letters and phonological memory.