Playing with language is an important part of early literacy development. Phonological Awareness, phonemic awareness and phonics are all explicitly taught in our classrooms. While we play with language in school, parents and guardians can play with language at home or even in the car.
Phonological Awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate oral language. Phonological awareness includes identifying and producing words that rhyme. As well as the understanding that a spoken sentence can be broken down into individual words. Words can further be broken down into syllables, onset and rime and individual sounds.
Examples of Phonological Awareness:
Sentence: If a person were to say the sentence, "I like to play at the park". A child would be able to identify that this sentence contains 7 words.
Word: Syllables- The word "cat" has one syllable; "Doghouse" has two syllables; "Caterpillar" has four syllables.
Onset/rime- In the word "cat" c-is the onset; at- is the rime
Sounds- the word "cat" is made up of three sounds: /c/, /a/, /t/
Phonemic Awareness is a component of Phonological Awareness. It is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. For example, when the word "ball" is spoken, the child understands that the word is made up with the sounds /b/, /a/, /l/. A child at the stage of PA can delete and substitute sounds. They can repeat the word "ball" and take away the /b/ and say "all". Additionally students at this level can change the /b/ to /w/ and say that the new word is "wall".
During the 2022-23 school year, we have adopted Heggerty as our phonological awareness program in kindergarten and for SRBI.