Chapter 5 Phonemic Awareness

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Chapter 5 Phonemic Awareness

• Janet Avery

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What?

• Phonemic Awareness is understanding that words
  can be broken down into smaller sounds
  phonemes.
• Phonemic Awareness is small part of the bigger
  Phonological Awareness words, syllables,
  rhymes, and finally phonemes.
• Being able to break words into their smallest
  parts phonemes, and being able to
  blend/segment/manipulate those phonemes is the
  most critical skill in relation to reading and
  spelling.

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Why?

• Phonemic awareness in itself is not critical for
  students it is critical in the big picture of
  learning to read and write well.
• To benefit from the tools that phonics can give a
  student in decoding, they must first understand
  the sounds in phonemic awareness/phonological
  skills.
• The phoneme gives the letters and blends sounds
  that make sense to the learner.

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When?

• The greatest impact of phonemic awareness
  instruction is in the earliest grades
  preschool, kindergarten, and first.
• From second grade on, phonemic instruction is
  only needed for students not reading at grade
  level or above.
• Older students who struggle with reading
  phonemic awareness screening needs to be done to
  check that the student have that foundation for
  success.

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How?

• Rhyming games allow students to manipulate
  phonemes to make words that rhyme.
• Use of manipulatives such as blocks or buttons
  allow students the kinesthetic outlet they move
  a block for each phoneme in a word.
• Use pictures to add/delete word parts on compound
  words such as football and starfish.

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Conclusion

• Phonemic awareness, and phonological skills are
  the building blocks on which good, fluent readers
  are built.
• It is most important to build this awareness in
  early grades, and even more important to assess
  that it was built with students who are
  struggling in later grades.