What is phonemic awareness and why do we need it?
- Phonemic awareness - understanding of phonemes (smallest units of sound) and how they work together to create words
- Young children need phonemic awareness in order to segment sounds in words and blend sounds into words.
Strategy #1: Show printed material to your child and talk about the sounds and structure of the words.
- Interaction with print has the greatest impact on phonemic awareness.
Strategy #2: Play letter games/phoneme substitution games.
- Visit the original resource for game ideas.
Strategy #3: Use auditory, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic representations of sounds to teach phonemic awareness.
- For example, have students clap the number of syllables in a spoken word (auditory), use blocks/chips to represent phonemes (visual/tactile), or jump as they repeat sounds back (kinesthetic).
Strategy #4: Provide early writing activities.
- Let your children guess how to spell words. Explain why they are correct or incorrect. Be creative with how you present these activities.
Strategy #5: Practice at home before school starts.
- Children who are frequently exposed to print and phonemic awareness activities earlier on typically have higher levels of phonemic awareness.
Other tips:
- Stay calm while working with children. Frustration (on the instructor end or the child end) leads to unproductive learning sessions.
- Keep practice sessions short (to ensure engagement) unless they want to keep going.
