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Defined: The ability to identify, manipulate, and play with individual sounds in spoken words

• Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill. 

• For example, the word cat is made up of three individual sounds  c/a/t.

• If I take away the "c" sound and replace it with the "b" sound, I have the word bat.

• Phonemic awareness is essential to learning to read.

Purposeful phonemic awareness instruction includes a sequence of skills from identifying, matching and then categorizing initial sounds in spoken words to blending and segmenting individual sounds in words.  Finally, students delete, substitute, and manipulate individual sounds.

• Read rhyming books to and with your child. Some great choices are: 

  • Brown Bear, Brown Bear,

  • Sheep in a Jeep,

  • Llama Llama Red Pajama,

  • A Wocket in My Pocket,

  • Room on the Broom.

• Sing rhyming songs and nursery rhymes

• "Rhyme Time": Think of words that rhyme with a given word.

• "Sound Scavenger Hunt": Find objects that start with specific sounds.

• Play I Spy with your child:

  • Play "I Spy" with sounds: "I spy something that starts with /b/"

• Practice combining words and syllables

  • Clap out syllables in words

  • Play sound deletion games: "Say 'cat' without the /k/ sound"

  • Book suggestion: "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" by Bill Martin Jr.

• Play guess my word

  • Isolate the sounds of a word and ask them to guess the word /b/ /i/ /g/

*Ideas from Brainspring

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