PHONEMIC AWARENESS
Birth to 1st GRADE
AGENDA
Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the knowledge of sounds that make up words.
Phonemic Awareness
like /a/ /ch/ or /z/.
out of words, is an important skill and
awareness that children must have when
they begin to read.
44
Can you guess how many sounds are in the English language?
All phonemic instruction is AUDITORY (no letters!).
This skill is developed starting at birth and continues through kindergarten.
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness.
is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words.
It is an important predictor of a
child’s ability to read and write because children will apply their knowledge of sounds
to words they read on their own.
Lack of phonemic awareness is an early indicator of reading difficulty.
Phonemic Awareness
Phonics
PHONEMIC AWARENESS | PHONICS |
Auditory - requires hearing | Visual - requires looking at print |
Phonemes - oral sounds | Letter pronunciation |
Speech sounds to letters | Letters have sounds |
Students hear and say the sounds of spoken language. | Students read words in print by “sounding out” phonemes, blending them and saying the word. |
Phonics vs. Phonemic Awareness
“It turns out that children who are likely to become poor readers are generally not as sensitive to the sounds of spoken words as children who were likely to become good readers.
Kids who struggle have what is called poor “phonemic awareness,” which means that their processor for dissecting words into component sound is less discerning than it is for other kids.”
How Do We Teach Phonemic Awareness?
START WITH: Rhyming words and then moves to
THEN: Helping children learn how to divide (or segment) sentences into words
NEXT: Words into syllables
CONTINUE: Breaking words into onset and rimes: back = b + ack
THEN: Segmenting one-syllable words into phonemes: /c/ /a/ /t/ = cat
FINALLY: Manipulating and switching out phonemes: cat-c = at b+at = bat
See the original image at: http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254/
Phonemic
What Does the Research Say?
A research study by Brady, Fowler, and Winbury (1994) studied urban children, ages 4 and 5, and found that fewer than half could generate rhymes and none could segment simple words into phonemes or read any words.
But…..
What Does the Research Say?
The children who received training in rhyme and segmentation could generate rhymes and segment phonemes at the end of an 18-hour training period, thus demonstrating that these skills can be taught to kindergarten students in a relatively short period of time when presented systematically.
Critical Components in Early Literacy, 2001
Rhyming
Rhyming is the ability to hear sounds that are similar in words.
We can hear that those words sound the same at the end.
This is one of the easiest phonemic awareness skills for children to learn.
Rhyming
Rhyming Basket
Objects are placed in a basket (one object for each child present), and the basket is passed around the circle. As each child gets the basket, I say a word (such as “fizzers”) and they pull out the object that rhymes (“scissors”).
You can use any objects, because it doesn’t matter if the rhyming words are real words or nonsense words.
Nursery Rhymes
“When children hear nursery rhymes, they hear the sounds vowels and consonants make. They learn how to put these sounds together to make words. They also practice pitch, volume, and voice inflection, as well as the rhythm of language.
In nursery rhymes, children hear new words that they would not hear in everyday language:
Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water.
“Nursery rhymes are short and easy to repeat, so they
become some of a
child’s first
sentences.”
Click here to download these Nursery Rhymes->
Incorporate them into the day, especially if they match the sounds and letters that are being taught for that day.
Matching Sounds
Children are able to listen for words that start with the same beginning sound.
This is called alliteration.
Bee and buzz start the same way
but marble and bat do not.
Sentence Segmentation
Sentence segmentation occurs when
sentences are broken up into individual
words.
How many words are
in the sentence:
“Sally sells seashells by the seashore”?
You are listening to HEAR each individual
word, not looking at the words on the page.
Syllable Segmentation
Syllable segmentation (taking apart) and
blending (putting together syllables or parts of words)
occurs when children separate words into syllables or put syllables into words.
snowman: /snow/ + /man/
Syllable Segmentation
Syllable blending is when you put syllables together.
For example, given the syllables
/toe/ /mae/ /toe/
creates the word
tomato
Have you noticed that each syllable has one vowel sound?
Onset-Rime Blending
and Segmentation
bell
The first sound in a word is the ONSET.
/b/ = onset
The rest of the word is the RIME.
/ell/ = rime
.
Phoneme Deletion and Manipulation
These are two more ways to play with sounds.
hat - /h/ = /at/
Manipulation is when one sound is exchanged for another.
Delete a sound by taking one away.
man - /m/
+ /c/ = can
How do we
teach and
support a
child’s
Phonemic
Awareness?
Teaching Segmenting
Break the word
“pot”
into 3 parts.
Have students push counters into each box as they say out loud each sound.
Then have them sweep their finger from left to right under the boxes as they say the word “pot”.
Teaching Phonemic Awareness using Elkonian Boxes
This is only a listening exercise! They are not using letters yet, they should NOT SEE THE WORD.
Students will push a counter into a box to represent each sound they hear.
How many sounds are in the word
fish?
Children who develop
strong PHONEMIC AWARENESS skills at an early age
are MORE LIKELY to become FLUENT READERS
and better spellers than children who do not.
PHONEMIC AWARENESS
Birth to 1st GRADE