Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds (phonemes).  A reader who is able to manipulate the sounds. isolate sounds, blend and segment the sounds into spoken or written words. 

Phonemic awareness is important because it can help develop the readers ability to rhyming words, sound substitution words,  isolation and segmentation.

How to teach phonemic awareness? 

1.  The Individualized Approach Instruction: Some students come prepared when phonemic awearness. THis approach helps the students who are not. Therefore, it individualized to meet the specific needs of each child in the classroom.
2. Teaching With or Without Letters: Teaching students phonemic awareness with letters help solidify the students skills. phonemic awareness is a listening and speaking skill rather than a reading skill. However, Print words allow them to see and apply the connection between sounds and letters when reading.
3. Key Word Substitution: Helps the students develop an understanding of the role that phonemes play in the meaning of words. For example "Pop Goes the Weasel." if the word pop can be substituted with "Hop Goes the Weasel." it completely changes the meaning of the sentence. 
4. Clapping and Tapping: Students can see that words are made up fo several sounds and syllables.  It is to allow them to break up the words by clapping or tapping our the syllables. 

Links for Phonemic Awareness Actives: 

Activity 1 Link

Activity 2 Link

Activity 3 Link

Phonics

Phonics is a method of teaching others how to read by correlating sounds with letters.  It can also be used to correlate sounds with groups of letters in a alphabetic writing system.

It is a connection between graphemes (letter symbols) and sounds.

Elements of Phonics in a classroom:

Helps the students achieve word identification. The goal is to help the students quickly determine the sounds in unfamiliar written words.

How Phonics can be incorporated in Reading:

Synthetic Phonics: builds words from the ground up. The readers can connect the letters with their corresponding phonemes.  The reader can then blend those together to create the word. Another approach is the analytic approach.  The analytic approach teaches sounds as part of the words.

Phonics has become an important impact on reading in schools.  Students are now receiving phonics instruction in grades kindergarten through first. Having phonics instruction start at those grade levels has significantly increased the students’ comprehension of reading and spelling.  For the upper grade levels phonic instruction has become a big impact for students who are diverse learners.  Students’ who have an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) have received improvement by using phonic instruction.