Heggerty Phonemic Awareness

Heggerty Phonemic Awareness is a well-organized 35-week curriculum of daily phonemic awareness lessons. This is how your child learns to notice and manipulate the sounds in words, which is a key pillar in their reading and writing development.

Phonemic Awareness: the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds

Phonemes: The smallest parts of spoken language that combine to form words

Developed on a systematic scope and sequence of skills, each level focuses on eight phonemic awareness Skills, along with two additional activities to develop Letter and Sound recognition, and Language Awareness. The lessons are designed to deliver phonemic awareness instruction in a whole group setting and only take 10-12 minutes. 

8 Phonemic Awareness Skills addressed in Heggerty with examples:

1. Rhyming

   • Name a word that rhymes with dish.

2. Initial phoneme isolation

   • What is the first sound in pat?

3. Blending

   • Blend these sounds together: /c/,/l/,/i/,/p/. What word do you get?

4. Isolating final and medial phonemes 

   • What is the last sound in spark?

   • What is the middle sound in dash?

5. Segmenting

   • Tap out each sound in gift.

6. Adding phonemes

   • Say park. Add /s/ at the beginning. What's the new word?

7. Deleting phonemes

   • Say cart. Take off the /t/ sound. What's left?

8. Substituting phonemes

   • Say bill. Change /b/ to /p/. What's the new word?