September 24, 2018

PHONEMIC AWARENESS

Phonemic Awareness is an important early reading skill for preschoolers and kindergarteners to develop. It is the ability to play with sounds in a variety of ways to manipulate, substitute, and hear isolated sounds. It is also an essential skill to develop before a student can learn to read.

Many of the students who have phonics difficulties also had an underdeveloped phonemic awareness. They could not isolate and blend sounds. They just didn’t have enough practice in listening to and playing with sounds, apart from the letters.

When a five-year-old enters kindergarten, their phonemic awareness skills need to be as strong as ever. Phonemic Awareness is an important early reading skill for preschoolers and kindergarteners to develop.

WHAT IS PHONEMIC AWARENESS?

In the simplest of terms, it is an awareness of sounds. It is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound that have meaning.

One very important thing to emphasize is that phonemic awareness is done without letters. It is all sound. Once you add letters, it becomes phonics. Students need a strong phonemic awareness foundation before you add phonics on top of it.

COMPONENTS OF PHONEMIC AWARENESS

RHYMING / ALLITERATION

Rhyming is one of the earlier phonemic awareness skills to develop. It is present in most of our nursery rhymes and songs for young children. Alliteration is like rhyming, but on the other side of the word.

Rhyming is a difficult skill to learn for some readers, especially for English learners. Although rhyming is a phonemic awareness skill, I wouldn’t focus intervention on it. Teach it, yes. Do songs, poems, and rhymes in your classroom, yes. However, if a student is not able to produce rhyming words after some instruction, I would move into the other phonemic awareness skills. Is Rhyming Ability Important in Reading? is a great article about how much emphasis to put on rhyming. The basic conclusion is that the other components of phonemic awareness are more influential in reading success than rhyming.

ORAL BLENDING & SEGMENTING

Oral blending is the ability to put units of sounds together.  Oral Segmenting is the ability to break a word apart into the units of sound. For example, say the word cat. Tell me the sounds in cat. /k/ /a/ /t/.  Both segmenting and blending should be practiced regularly.

Start with compound words, like pancake, then move onto (2) two-syllable words, then onto (3) cvc words with continuous sounds. Finally do (4) open syllables, (5) cvc with stop sounds, and (6) long vowel patterns.

INITIAL, FINAL, MEDIAL SOUND ISOLATION & IDENTIFICATION

Consonant isolation is the ability to tell the first sound of a word. For instance, say the word cat, tell me the first sound, /k/? Teach and practice the initial, final and then medial sounds. Start with consonants in the initial and final positions before you work on the vowels.

DELETION

Deletion is the ability to remove a sound from a word and tell what is left. For instance, say the word cat. Remove the /k/. What is left?

SUBSTITUTION

Substitution is like deletion, but a little more advanced. It requires a student to remove a sound and place another sound in its place. For instance, say the word cat. Replace the /k/ with /b/. What do you have?

PHONEMIC AWARENESS ACTIVITIES

Most phonemic awareness actives should be done daily for short intervals of time throughout the day. The point is short, frequent interactions with the sounds to build competency, moving from simple cvc words to more complex blends. Also move from simple rhyming and identification tasks to segmenting, blending, deletion and substitution tasks.

Which words do you choose? Choose words based on the activities that you’re doing in class and stories that you’re already reading with students. Pull words that are familiar to students and play around with the words.  Having some familiarity with the words will help students break them apart into their sounds.

 TIPS

1.          Be sure you are pronouncing the sounds consistently and accurately.  The stop sounds are the most difficult, because we want to put an /uh/ sound after them, like buh. Do your best to isolate the sound. Like for /p/, put your hand in front of your mouth and feel the air. It’s quick.  Likewise, exaggerate the continuous sounds more than usual. Like, /m/ should be mmmmmmmmmmmm . . . emphasize that it’s a continuous sound. This over emphasis will pay off when you get to blending.
2.      Use the letter sound, not the name, when you’re working on phonemic awareness skills. Using the sound consistently helps students form a pattern isolating the sound.
3.  Do not use letters or symbols. I said this earlier, but this is an important distinction. Phonemic awareness is the awareness of sound without letters. When you add letters, it becomes phonics.
4.   Pictures help, especially for English learners or students with speech problems. If you can find a good source for pictures of common cvc words. Picture Sorting for Phonemic Awareness has some good pictures in it.
5.  Use the full body. Have students hold up their fist and then fingers to isolate sounds. I would have them put their hands together with the finger tips touching and draw them apart to blend sounds slowly. (Slinkies are a great tool for this, too!) Have students hop each sound. Draw some boxes or dots onto floor and have students hop or walk the sounds. Clap hands for sounds or syllables.

·         Pay attention to your students. Assessments help to understand where a student is in their phonemic awareness journey. Can they rhyme? Identify initial, final, and medial sounds? Can they delete sounds? Substitute sounds? I know assessments are a lot of work, but they also give you a lot of information, if they’re the right assessment, and can guide your instruction to make it meaningful, focused and valuable for most students in your classroom. Assessments will also tell you which students are not successful, so you can focus more targeting instruction with them in small groups.

·         If something is not working, try something else. There is no right way to teach phonemic awareness for all students. Some things will click for some students and other things for other students. The point is that students are learning to play with sounds and learning how to blend and segment sounds, so that they can apply those skills to reading and phonics instruction.

Enjoy,

Ms. Nora Sierra