Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is understanding sounds in words, rhyming, and syllables. Strong phonemic awareness is important to early reading skills.   

A great way to practice phonemic awareness is to play word/sound games with your child. For example, you can play rhyming games by giving your child a word such as hat and ask your child to produce a new word that rhymes with hat.  Continue taking turns until all words are exhausted (hat, bat, cat, fat, rat, sat, mat, splat).  Many students have a difficult time rhyming and will give a new word with the same beginning sound.  You can use the word family of the week as a starting place for rhymes each week.  

You can work on helping your child identify the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words.  You can give your child a word, or show them a picture and ask what is the beginning sound in the word.  For example, say the word moon and ask “What is the beginning sound you hear in the word moon?”  The correct response is the sound “m”.  Notice the correct response is the sound “m” not the letter m.  If your child says the letter m ask them to produce the sound.  You can do the same for the sounds at the end and middle of words.  What is the sound in the middle of the word pig?  /i/ is the sound in the middle of pig.  What is the sound in the middle of the word rake? /a/ (long /a/ sound) is the sound in the middle of rake.  What is the sound at the end of the word rat? /t/ is the sound at the end of rat.  Notice the child should identify both long and short vowel sounds in the middle of words.

You can also work on syllables by clapping out words.  For example, the word elephant can be clapped out “el-e-phant”.  Ask your child how many syllables are in the word elephant?  “Three, the word elephant has three syllables”  The one syllable words tend to be the trickiest of all.  Students want to clap out each sound rather than each syllable.  Many student will say the word bike has 3 syllables rather than just 1.  Lots of practice will help with the difference between sounds and syllables.  

You can work on blending sounds by asking your child to guess the word you are saying as you say each sound one at a time (c-u-p).  You can work on segmenting words by asking your child to tell you all of the sounds they hear in words.  For example, in the word dog your child should say three separate sounds (d-o-g).  When we do this in class we hold up a separate finger for each sound.  This activity helps your child read unfamiliar words by blending the sounds together.  It also helps your child spell unfamiliar words by listening to each sound. 

You can work on changing sounds, adding sounds, and deleting sounds,  in words.  Here are some examples: 

changing sounds:

change the /h/ in hat to /b/  child should say the new word bat

change the /i/ in bin to /u/   child should say the new word bun

change the /g/ in pig to /t/   child should say the new word pit

We change sounds in the beginning, middle, and at the end of words.

adding sounds:

add /b/ to the beginning of lock    child should say the new word block

add /t/ to the end of car               child should say the new word cart

deleting sounds: 

what is bat without /b/                child should say the new word at

what is sink without /s/               child should say the new word ink

what is smile without /s/             child should say the new word mile

what is farm without /m/             child should say the new word far

what is fort without /t/                child should say the new word for