Cracking the Alphabetic Code
How do children develop phonemicl awareness?
Learn about phonemic awareness and your kids!
Phonemic awareness is when students learn to notice and manipulate the sounds of oral language. It is a vital part of phonics, where students learn to convert letters into sounds and blend them into words. Phonics instruction starts as soon as pre-school and kindergarten.
Parts of Phonemic Awareness
Phonemes are the smallest unit of speech and are written as graphemes, or letters of the alphabet.
Strategies to Teach Phonemic Awareness
Identifying Sounds - recognize doll ends with /l/
Categorizing Sounds in Words - recognize "sun" is the odd one out of ring, rabbit, and sun
Substituting Sounds - able to remove a sound from a word and replace with a new one, i.e. replacing the /c/ in "car" with /b/ to make "bar."
Blending Sounds - ability to blend multiple individual sounds to from a word, i.e. /p/ /i/ /g/ creates "pig."
Segmenting Sounds - able to break a word apart into its beginning, middle, or end, i.e. "go" into /g/ /o/.
Importance of Phonemic Awareness
Critical to success in:
- Reading
- Writing
Learn more about phonemic awareness today to help set your children up for a successful future!