MRU Literacy
Word Play: Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual phonemes (sounds) in words.
These activities will help your student to develop phonemic awareness skills, especially in K-1. The following resources will help to guide your teaching and sequence of concepts.
Teaching Strategies
Where do I start teaching phonemic awareness?
Heggerty and Kilpatrick provide a range of phonemic awareness lessons. Blending and segmenting are especially important.
Heggerty's Phonemic Awareness Lessons
Teachers following Heggerty briefly teach each of the 10 components of phonemic awareness in each lesson. You may opt to do fewer each day to allow time for other word play experiences.
Follow the links to access the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Lessons document to see examples.
Additional Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Lessons: Heggerty 28, 32, 35
Kilpatrick's Phonemic Awareness Lessons
Phonemic awareness skills are levelled from simple to complex in Kilpatrick's lessons. For older students, you may wish to use Kilpatrick advanced phonemic awareness activities (Level J+) and focusing mainly on areas where your student needs work.
Follow the link to access the Kilpatrick One Minute Activities document.
Heggerty Components of Phonemic Awareness
For more information, see Heggerty's YouTube Channel.
These videos demonstrate the components of phonemic awareness from the Heggerty curriculum. The demonstration videos show a teacher practicing this skill with a student.
- Rhyming
Rhyme repetition, rhyme recognition, and rhyme production
Video Demonstration
2. Onset fluency/Initial phoneme isolation
The focus of this skill is on hearing the first sounds in a word including consonant diagraphs like ch, sh, th.
Video Demonstration
3. Blending
Blending is a basic phonemic awareness skill that teaches students to hear the individual sounds of a word and blend them together into a spoken word. In this video, Alisa models blending words, syllables, body-coda, onset-rhyme, and individual sound.
Video Demonstration
4. Isolating final and medial sounds
In this skill tutorial video, Marjorie models the "Punch it Out" hand motion used in the Heggerty PA curriculum to help isolate the final sound.
The focus is on hearing the medial or vowel sound in a word. In this skill tutorial video, Marjorie models the "Roller Coaster" hand motion used in the Heggerty PA curriculum to help students isolate medial sounds.
Video Demonstration
5. Segmenting
Segmenting is a basic phonemic awareness skill that teaches students to hear the individual sounds in a spoken word. In this skill tutorial video, Alisa models segmenting compound words, multi-syllabic words, onset-rhyme, and individual sounds (phonemes).
Video Demonstration
6. Adding
Adding is an advanced phonemic awareness skill that manipulates words, syllables, and sounds to make new words. In this skill tutorial video, Alisa models the hand motion for adding a word, syllable, or sound to make a new word.
Video Demonstration
7. Deleting
Deleting is an advanced phonemic awareness skill that manipulates words, syllables, and sounds. In this skill tutorial video, Alisa models the hand motion for deleting a compound word, syllable, or sound from a whole word.
Video Demonstration
8. Substituting
Substituting is an advanced phonemic awareness skill that manipulates words, syllables, and sounds to make new words. In this skill tutorial video, Alisa models the hand motion for substituting a word, syllable, or sound to make a new word.
Video Demonstration
9. Language Awareness
Includes repeating a sentence aloud, counting the number of words in a sentence, and reciting nursery rhymes.
10. Letter naming/Alphabet knowledge
Video Demonstration
Kilpatrick Levels of Phonological Awareness
2Fun4Words Card Games
These video links demonstrate games using the 2Fun4Words cards in the Lit Kit.
Tips:
Remember phonemic awareness is different from phonics: phonemic awareness can be done with your eyes shut because it is all about the sounds, not letters.
Follow this link to a Google Doc that includes teaching ideas to enrich Phonological Awareness.