Phonemic Awarenss and and phonological awareness are both foundational literacy skills required to become a proficient reader.  Both are oral and auditory, focusing on the sounds in words.

• Phonological Awareness is a broad skill that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language.  It refers to the bigger "chunks" or "parts" of language.  When we ask students to rhyme, blend small words to make a compound word, break words apart into syllables or onset-rime, we are working at the phonological awareness level.

• Phonemic Awareness is a subset of phonological awareness.  It is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes.  A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound we hear in a word.  When we ask students to blend or segment words into the smallest unit of sound they hear (e.g., the four sounds /p/ /l/ /a/ /n/ can be blended to make the whole word plan) we are working at the phonemic awareness level.

What are Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness? | Heggerty