Written By: Alexis Pawlowski

Intervention Coordinator

May 2022

Phonemic Awareness, the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words, is currently a hot topic among educators. Phonemic awareness involves having students listen to, say, and manipulate sounds they hear in words.

Phonemic Awareness is one of the 5 pillars of reading. It is the ability to understand that words are made up of individual sounds.

Rhyming, blending sounds students hear, segmenting or pulling sounds apart, and manipulating sounds by adding, deleting, and substituting sounds they hear in words are ways students practice developing their phonemic awareness.

Classroom Games

I love helping teachers incorporate phonemic awareness practice in their classrooms through games!!

When teaching phonemic awareness, I sit students in a circle and engage them in whole group practice. I provide a word, and then students produce a rhyme for that word. I use picture cards. Students pull a picture out of a box, identify the picture, and then choose a person in the circle to produce a rhyme. That student pulls a picture from the box and says their word.

Pictures can also be used to identify beginning or ending sounds. If a student has a picture of a flower, the teacher can ask, “What is the beginning sound in flower?” (f) Teachers can then extend their questioning to, “What blend does flower begin with?” (fl)

Classroom games often rely on manipulatives such as play-doh, rocks, bean bags, counters, and blocks.

Practicing at Home

With summer around the corner, there are fun ways for parents to include phonemic awareness practice in everyday play as well!

Nursery Rhymes: Have you ever sung the Apples and Bananas song? We change the first vowel sound in each word, creating a nonsense word. Parents can sing other nursery rhymes and change the rhyming words around.

Hopscotch: Use known letters or letter combinations rather than numbers to play hopscotch. When a child lands on a space, they produce a word that contains that sound, or they can provide part of a word and add that sound to the beginning or end to create a known word.

Basketball dribbling/football or baseball toss: Parents can say a word for sports-driven students. Students can dribble for each sound in the word or throw the ball back and forth, stating each sound they hear in a given word.

I’m thinking of a word: While driving or going on walks, families can play the “I’m thinking of a word” game. Examples include, “I’m thinking of a word that begins with….” “This word has the ____ sound in the middle.” “This word rhymes with ______.”

Phonemic awareness is a mainstay and essential pre-reading skill. Starting as early as preschool, children are capable of hearing the sounds we use in words (as well as having fun exploring them).

Check out readingrockets.org for more information on phonemic awareness.