# data[].attributes.body
Assessments

# data[].attributes.body
Assessments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Academic

Students will be able to isolate and pronounce initial, medial, and final sounds by using a method of stretching out words.

Language

Students will be able to isolate the initial and final sounds with grade level words using written and visual supports.

Point to the class alphabet chart.

Ask students to sing the alphabet song with you.

Explain to the class that today you will be practicing listening for the different sounds of the letters in the alphabet to spell some new words.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phonological Awareness | Lesson Plan | Education.com | Lesson plan | Education.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Academic Students will be able to isolate and pronounce initial, medial, and final sounds by using a method of stretching out words. Language Students will be able to isolate the initial and final sounds with grade level words using written and visual supports. Point to the class alphabet chart.

# data[].attributes.body
Assessments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phonological Awareness Assessment | Reading A-Z

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Award-winning reading solution with thousands of leveled readers, lesson plans, worksheets and assessments to teach guided reading, reading proficiency and comprehension to K-5 students

# data[].attributes.body
Assessments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading. Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described. Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading. Considerations for assessing children's phonological awareness are discussed, and descriptions of available measures are provided.

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily;
Life is but a dream

Bow, bow, bow your boat
bently bown the beam.
Berrily, berrily, berrily, berrily;
Bife is but a beam.

Sow, sow, sow your soat
sently sown the seam.
Serrily, serrily, serrily, serrily;
Sife is sut a seam.

Activities like substituting different sounds for the first sound of a familiar song can help children develop phonological awareness, a cognitive substrate to reading acquisition. Becoming phonologically aware prepares children for later reading instruction, including instruction in phonics, word analysis, and spelling (Adams, Foorman, Lundberg, & Beeler, 1998; Chard, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998). The most common barrier to learning early word reading skills is the inability to process language phonologically (Liberman, Shankweiler, & Liberman, 1989). Moreover, developments in research and understanding have revealed that this weakness in phonological processing most often hinders early reading development for both students with and without disabilities (Fletcher et al., 1994).

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness. Perhaps the most exciting finding emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children's reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O'Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993). Despite the promising findings, however, many questions remain unanswered, and many misconceptions about phonological awareness persist. For example, researchers are looking for ways to determine how much and what type of instruction is necessary and for whom. Moreover, many people do not understand the difference between phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics. Still others are uncertain about the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading.

The purposes of this article are to (a) clarify some of the salient findings from research on phonological awareness and reading and (b) translate those findings into practical information for teachers of children with learning disabilities or children who are experiencing delays in early reading. To this end, we answer three questions:

1. What is phonological awareness, and why is it important to beginning reading success?

2. What are documented effective principles that should guide phonological awareness instruction?

3. What principles should guide the assessment of phonological awareness?

What is phonological awareness?

Phonological awareness is the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Spoken language can be broken down in many different ways, including sentences into words and words into syllables (e. g., in the word simple, /sim/ and /ple/), onset and rime (e. g., in the word broom, /br/ and /oom/), and individual phonemes (e.g., in the word hamper, /h/, /a/, /m/, /p/, /er/). Manipulating sounds includes deleting, adding, or substituting syllables or sounds (e.g., say can; say it without the /k/; say can with /m/ instead of /k/). Being phonologically aware means having a general understanding at all of these levels.

Figure 1. A continuum of complexity of phonological awareness activities

Operationally, skills that represent children's phonological awareness lie on a continuum of complexity (see Figure 1). At the less complex end of the continuum are activities such as initial rhyming and rhyming songs as well as sentence segmentation that demonstrates an awareness that speech can be broken down into individual words. At the center of the continuum are activities related to segmenting words into syllables and blending syllables into words. Next are activities such as segmenting words into onsets and rimes and blending onsets and rimes into words.

Finally, the most sophisticated level of phonological awareness is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words are made up of individual sounds or phonemes and the ability to manipulate these phonemes either by segmenting, blending, or changing individual phonemes within words to create new words. The recent National Research Council report on reading distinguishes phonological awareness from phonemic awareness in this way:

The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning. When that insight includes an understanding that words can he divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness. (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998, p. 51)

Throughout this article we will use the term phonological awareness to mean an awareness at all levels from basic rhyme to phonemic awareness. Only in some specific instances will we use the term phonemic awareness.

At this point, it is important to note that phonological awareness differs distinctly from phonics. Phonological awareness involves the auditory and oral manipulation of sounds. Phonics is the association of letters and sounds to sound out written symbols (Snider, 1995); it is a system of teaching reading that builds on the alphabetic principle, a system of which a central component is the teaching of correspondences between letters or groups of letters and their pronunciations (Adams, 1990). Phonological awareness and phonics are intimately intertwined, but they are not the same. This relationship will be further described in the following section.

Children generally begin to show initial phonological awareness when they demonstrate an appreciation of rhyme and alliteration. For many children, this begins very early in the course of their language development and is likely facilitated by being read to from books that are based on rhyme or alliteration, such as the B Book by Stanley and Janice Berenstain, 1997, or Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg, 1979, (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990). As children grow older, however, their basic phonological awareness does not necessarily develop into the more sophisticated phonemic awareness. In fact, developing the more complex phonemic awareness is difficult for most children and very difficult for some children (Adams et al., 1996). However, it is a child's phonemic awareness on entering school that is most closely related to success in learning to read (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986).

Why is phonological awareness so important?

An awareness of phonemes is necessary to grasp the alphabetic principle that underlies our system of written language. Specifically, developing readers must be sensitive to the internal structure of words in order to benefit from formal reading instruction (Adams, 1990; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974). If children understand that words can be divided into individual phonemes and that phonemes can be blended into words, they are able to use letter-sound knowledge to read and build words. As a consequence of this relationship, phonological awareness in kindergarten is a strong predictor of later reading success (Ehri & Wilce, 1980, 1985; Liberman et al., 1974; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987). Researchers have shown that this strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success persists throughout school (Calfee, Lindamood, & Lindamood, 1973; Shankweiler et al., 1995).

Over the past 2 decades, researchers have focused primarily on the contribution of phonological awareness to reading acquisition. However, the relationship between phonological awareness and reading is not unidirectional but reciprocal in nature (Stanovich, 1986). Early reading is dependent on having some understanding of the internal structure of words, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is very effective in promoting early reading. However, instruction in early reading-specifically, explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondence appears to strengthen phonological awareness, and in particular the more sophisticated phonemic awareness (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).

Many children with learning disabilities demonstrate difficulties with phonological awareness skills (Shaywitz, 1996). However, many other children have such difficulty without displaying other characteristics of learning disabilities. Although a lack of phonemic awareness correlates with difficulty in acquiring reading skills, this lack should not necessarily be misconstrued as a disability (Fletcher et al., 1994). More important, children who lack phonemic awareness can be identified, and many of them improve their phonemic awareness with instruction. Furthermore, although explicit instruction in phonological awareness is likely to improve early reading for children who lack phonemic awareness, most children with or without disabilities are likely to benefit from such instruction (R. E. O'Connor, personal communication, June 2, 1998).

In short, success in early reading depends on achieving a certain level of phonological awareness. Moreover, instruction in phonological awareness is beneficial for most children and seems to be critical for others, but the degree of explicitness and the systematic nature of instruction may need to vary according to the learner's skills (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1998), especially for students at risk for reading difficulties. With this in mind, we discuss documented approaches to teaching phonological awareness.

Teaching phonological awareness

There is ample evidence that phonological awareness training is beneficial for beginning readers starting as early as age 4 (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991). In a review of phonological research, Smith et al. (1998) concluded that phonological awareness can be developed before reading and that it facilitates the subsequent acquisition of reading skills. Documented effective approaches to teaching phonological awareness generally include activities that are age appropriate and highly engaging. Instruction for 4-year-olds involves rhyming activities, whereas kindergarten and first-grade instruction includes blending and segmenting of words into onset and rime, ultimately advancing to blending, segmenting, and deleting phonemes. This pattern of instruction follows the continuum of complexity illustrated in Figure 1. Instruction frequently involves puppets who talk slowly to model word segmenting or magic bridges that are crossed when children say the correct word achieved by synthesizing isolated phonemes. Props such as colored cards or pictures can be used to make abstract sounds more concrete. During the last few years, publishers have produced multiple programs in phonological awareness, some of which are based on research. Two of these programs are Ladders to Literacy (O'Connor, Notari-Syverson, & Vadasy, 1998) and Teaching Phonemic Awareness (Adams et al., 1996). Figures 2 through 4 are illustrations of phonemic awareness lessons that are based on examples from these programs.

Figure 2. Instructional activity that teaches synthesis of phonemes into words.

Guess-the-word game

Objective: Students will be able to blend and identify a word that is stretched out into its component sounds.

Materials Needed: Picture cards of objects that students are likely to recognize such as: sun, bell, fan, flag, snake, tree, book, cup, clock, plane

Activity: Place a small number of picture cards in front of children. Tell them you are going to say a word using "Snail Talk" a slow way of saying words (e.g., /fffffllllaaaag/). They have to look at the pictures and guess the word you are saying. It is important to have the children guess the answer in their head so that everyone gets an opportunity to try it. Alternate between having one child identify the word and having all children say the word aloud in chorus to keep children engaged.

Figure 3. An Instructional activity that teaches segmentation at multiple phonological levels.

Segmentation activities

Objectives: Students will be able to segment various parts of oral language.

Activity:

1. Early in phonological awareness instruction, teach children to segment sentences into individual words. Identify familiar short poems such as "I scream you scream we all scream for ice cream!" Have children clap their hands with each word.

2. As children advance in their ability to manipulate oral language, teach them to segment words into syllables or onsets and rimes. For example, have children segment their names into syllables: e.g., Ra-chel, Al-ex-an-der, and Rod-ney.

3. When children have learned to remove the first phoneme (sound) of a word, teach them to segment short words into individual phonemes: e.g., s-u-n, p-a-t, s-t-o-p.

Figure 4. An instructional activity that teaches phoneme deletion and substitution.

Change-a-name game

Objective: Students will be able to recognize words when the teacher says the word with the first sound removed.

Activity: Have students sit in a circle on the floor. Secretly select one child and change their name by removing the first sound of the name. For example, change Jennifer to Ennifer or change William to Illiam. As you change the name, the children have to identify who you are talking about.

Extension Ideas: As children become better at identifying the child's name without the first sound, encourage them to try removing the beginning sounds of words and pronounce the words on their own.

After children learn how to remove sounds, teach them to substitute the beginning sound in their name with a new sound. The teacher can model this, beginning with easier sounds (common sounds of consonant s, e.g., /m/, /t/, /p/) and advancing to more complex sounds and sound blends (e.g., /ch/, /st/).

Most early phonological awareness activities are taught in the absence of print, but there is increasing evidence that early writing activities, including spelling words as they sound (i.e., invented or temporary spelling), appear to promote more refined phonemic awareness (Ehri, 1998; Treiman, 1993). It may be that during spelling and writing activities children begin to combine their phonological sensitivity and print knowledge and apply them to building words. Even if children are unable to hold and use a pen or pencil, they can use letter tiles or word processing programs to practice their spelling.

Instruction in phonological awareness can be fun, engaging, and age appropriate, but the picture is not as simple as it seems. First, evidence suggests that instruction in the less complex phonological skills such as rhyming or onset and rime may facilitate instruction in more complex skills (Snider, 1995) without directly benefiting reading acquisition (Gough, 1998). Rather, integrated instruction in segmenting and blending seems to provide the greatest benefit to reading acquisition (e.g., Snider, 1995). Second, although most children appear to benefit from instruction in phonological awareness, in some studies there are students who respond poorly to this instruction or fail to respond at all. For example, in one training study that provided 8 weeks of instruction in phonemic awareness, the majority of children demonstrated significant growth, whereas 30% of the at-risk students demonstrated no measurable growth in phonological awareness (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1994). Similarly, in a 12-week training in blending and segmenting for small groups (3-4 children) in 2-minute sessions four times a week, about 30% of the children still obtained very low scores on the segmenting posttest and 10 % showed only small improvements on the blending measures (Torgesen et al., 1994).

Torgesen et al. (1994) concluded that training for at-risk children must be more explicit or more intense than what is typically described in the research literature if it is to have a substantial impact on the phonological awareness of many children with severe reading disabilities. Therefore, we recommend two tiers of instruction. The first tier of instruction is the highly engaging, age-appropriate instruction that we introduced earlier. The second tier of instruction includes more intensive and strategic instruction in segmenting and blending at the phoneme level (e.g., Snider, 1995).

Beside content, another issue that requires attention in phonological awareness instruction is curriculum design. From research, we are able to deduce principles for effectively designing phonological awareness instruction. These design principles apply for all students but are particularly important for students who respond poorly to instruction. In the design of phonological awareness instruction, the following general principles increase students' success (Chard & Osborn, 1998):

Start with continuous sounds such as /s/, /m/, and /f/ that are easier to pronounce than stop sounds such as /p/, /b/, and /k/;

Carefully model each activity as it is first introduced;

Move from larger units (words, onset-rime) to smaller units (individual phonemes);

Move from easier tasks (e.g., rhyming) to more complex tasks (e.g., blending and segmenting); and,

Consider using additional strategies to help struggling early readers manipulate sounds. These strategies may include using concrete objects (e.g., blocks, bingo chips) to represent sounds.

Research suggests that by the end of kindergarten children should be able to demonstrate phonemic blending and segmentation and to make progress in using sounds to spell simple words. Achieving these goals requires that teachers be knowledgeable about effective instructional approaches to teaching phonological awareness and be aware of the ongoing progress for each of their students. In the next section, we describe effective ways to assess phonological skills and monitor progress in phonological awareness.

Assessing phonological awareness

Assessment in phonological awareness serves essentially two purposes: to initially identify students who appear to be at risk for difficulty in acquiring beginning reading skills and to regularly monitor the progress of students who are receiving instruction in phonological awareness. The measures used to identify at-risk students must be strongly predictive of future reading ability and separate low and high performers. Measures used for monitoring progress must be sensitive to change and have alternate forms (Kaminski & Good, 1996). In this section, we discuss only measures that have been demonstrated to be valid and reliable. We report the technical adequacy of the measures in the Appendix, rather than in the narrative description of the measure.

As stated earlier, screening measures must be strongly predictive of future reading ability and must separate high from low performers. Measures of automatized color, object, number, or letter naming meet these criteria (Torgesen, Wagner, Rashotte, Burgess, & Hecht, 1997; Wolf, 1991). Segmentation is a second skill that is highly predictive of future reading ability (e.g., Nation & Hulme, 1997; Torgesen et al., 1994; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Yopp, 1988). Unlike rapid naming, segmentation is a skill that can be taught, and the instruction of segmentation benefits reading acquisition.

Screening measures must also separate high from low performers. This means that they must address skills that are developmentally appropriate. Phonological awareness skills seem to develop along a continuum from rhyme to segmenting. Typically, students develop the ability to segment words into onset and rime during kindergarten and to segment words into separate phonemes between kindergarten and first grade. Therefore, most first-grade students perform well on an onset-rime measure, whereas most kindergarten students do poorly on a measure of segmenting into individual sounds. In either case it is difficult to separate low and high performers. Although we know a great deal about identifying students at risk for reading difficulties, many questions remain unanswered. We recommend that teachers use a variety of screening measures, including one that measures automatized rapid naming and one that measures phonemic awareness sensitivity or segmenting.

Typically, kindergarten students are screened for risk factors in acquiring beginning reading skills in the second semester of kindergarten. Appropriate screening measures for the second semester of kindergarten include measures that are strong predictors of a student's successful response to explicit phonemic awareness instruction or beginning reading acquisition. Such predictors of successful response to segmenting and blending instruction are the Test of Phonological Awareness-Kindergarten (TOPA-K; Torgesen & Bryant, 1993), a Nonword Spelling measure (Torgesen & Davis, 1996), and the Digit Naming Rate (Torgesen & Davis, 1996). Predictors of the successful acquisition of beginning reading skills include automatized naming of colors, objects, numbers, or letters (e.g., Wolf, 1991) and segmenting ability (e.g., Nation & Hulme, 1997; Torgesen et al., 1994; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987; Yopp, 1988). Other measures used during the second semester of kindergarten to identify students at risk for not acquiring beginning reading skills include measures of phoneme deletion.

The measures appropriate for identifying first-grade students at risk for not acquiring reading skills overlap those used in kindergarten. The TOPA-K and onset-rime are no longer appropriate, as students should have developed these skills by the end of kindergarten, whereas segmenting is still an emerging skill. However, tasks such as automatized naming of colors, objects, numbers, or letters remain predictors for students at risk for not acquiring beginning reading skills, as do measures to determine whether students lag behind their peers in phonological awareness, such as measures of segmenting.

When using screening measures, the teacher must establish decision rules for identifying students requiring phonological awareness instruction. The decision rules vary. The TOPA-K has normed scores and provides information to help a teacher decide whether to provide phonemic awareness instruction to students who score one or two standard deviations below the mean. However, there is little research evidence to guide decision making about which children should receive the more intensive phonological awareness instruction.

A second use of measures is to monitor students' progress. Unlike the screening measures, progress-monitoring measures must be sensitive to growth and require multiple forms. The Dynamic Indicators of Early Literacy (Kaminski & Good, 1996) fit this requirement and are appropriate for kindergarten and first grade. After the first semester of first grade, teachers may also be interested in monitoring their students' progress in generalizing phonemic awareness to reading and spelling. Two other measures of reading that are sensitive to growth and have alternative forms are oral reading fluency (tasks) and nonsense word reading fluency (Tindal & Marston, 1990).

As with screening measures, teachers must establish decision rules about how to gauge the progress of their students. One way is to establish a baseline by graphing three measurement points before the start of instruction, adding each subsequent data point to the graph, and checking the slope of students' progress. If many students are making slower progress than necessary to reach the level of their average-achieving peers, the teacher can modify the instruction by increasing one or more of the elements in the instructional guidelines. For example, if students are not acquiring segmenting, the teacher may decide to add more scaffolds, such as cards that the students can move as they segment words, thereby making segmenting instruction more explicit, or provide students with more guided practice. If most students successfully respond to instruction but a few respond poorly or not at all, the teacher may decide to place these students in a flexible group to receive more intense instruction. The teacher could also choose to provide some individuals with more intense instruction throughout the day to keep them up with their peers. If the progress-monitoring measures indicate that the first-grade students receiving instruction in phonological awareness lag behind their peers in reading or spelling, the teacher may choose to increase the integrated instruction in letter- sound correspondence and to make stronger the links between segmenting and blending skills and reading. Brief descriptions of the screening and monitoring measures that have demonstrated validity and reliability through research follow. For each measure, we indicate the grade and purpose for which the measure is appropriate. Note that some measures are appropriate for more than one grade level and for both screening and monitoring progress.

Test of phonological awareness- kindergarten

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure of phonemic sensitivity strongly predicts which students will demonstrate high segmenting ability following small-group instruction in phonemic awareness (Torgesen & Davis, 1996). The measure consists of one form with 10 items requiring students to indicate which of three words (represented by pictures) have the same first sound as a target word and 10 items that require students to indicate which of four words (represented by pictures) begins with a different first sound than the other three. The measure is administered to small groups of 6 to 10 children and is untimed. Students receive raw scores that are normed.

Nonword spelling

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure strongly predicts which kindergarten students will demonstrate growth in blending and segmenting after small-group phonological awareness instruction. Five nonwords (feg, rit, mub, gof, pid) comprise the measure. Students receive one point for each phoneme that they represent correctly in the spelling.

Digit naming rate

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure strongly predicts which kindergarten students are likely to demonstrate growth in blending after small-group phonological awareness instruction. The measure consists of six rows with five single digits per row on an 8 " x 11 " card. The students are timed as they name the digits as fast as they can, beginning at the top and continuing to the bottom. Students complete two trials using cards with differently arranged numbers. The score is based on the average time for the two series.

Yopp-SingerTest of phoneme segmentation

(Second Half of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen). This test (Yopp, 1995) consists of 22 items and requires students to separately articulate each phoneme in the presented words. The student receives credit only if all sounds in a word are presented correctly. The student does not receive partial credit for saying /c/ or /c/ /at/ for cat. One feature that differentiates this screening measure from others is that students receive feedback after each response. If the child's response is correct, the test administrator says, "That's right." If the student gives an incorrect response, the examiner tells the student the correct response. Moreover, if the student gives an incorrect response, the examiner writes the error. Recording the errors helps the teacher decide what remediation the student requires. The student's score is the number of items correctly segmented into individual phonemes. The test is administered individually and requires about 5 to 10 minutes per child.

Bruce test of phoneme deletion

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). The Bruce (1964) test assesses phoneme deletion, a more difficult and compound skill than segmenting (Yopp, 1995). The measure consists of 30 one- to three-syllable words drawn from words familiar to children between the ages of 5 and 61/2. The examiner asks students to delete one phoneme from the beginning, middle, or end of a word and to say the word that remains. The positions of deleted phonemes are randomly ordered throughout the test. The test is individually administered and requires 10 minutes to administer.

Auditory analysis test

(Second Half of Kindergarten; Screen). This measure (Rosner & Simon, 1971, cited in MacDonald & Cornwall, 1995) consists of 40 items arranged in order of difficulty from deletion of syllables in compound words to deletion of syllables in multisyllabic words to deletion of phonemes in beginning, middle, and end positions. The teacher asks the student to delete a syllable or phoneme and say the word that is left. The measure is administered individually.

Rapid letter naming, dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills

(Second Half of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen). The Rapid Letter Naming, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996) is another of many measures used to assess the rapid letter-naming ability of students. The measure has 18 alternate forms and consists of 104 randomly selected upper- and lowercase letters presented on one page. The measure is given individually, and students have 1 minute to name as many letters as possible in the order that they appear on the page.

Phoneme segmentation fluency, DIBELS

(End of Kindergarten, First Grade; Screen, Monitor Progress). The Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996) is one of many segmenting measures. The measure has 18 alternate forms. Each form consists of 10 words, each with two or three phonemes, randomly selected from words in the pre-primer and primer levels of the Scribner basal reading series. The measure is administered individually and is timed. Unlike the Yopp-Singer Test, students do not receive feedback on their responses but do receive scores for partially correct answers. In other words, for cat, a student receives a score of 1 for saying /c/, a score of 2 for saying /c/ /at/, or a score of 3 for saying /c/ /a/ /t/. Because this measure assesses the number of correct phonemes per minute, it is sensitive to growth and is, therefore, appropriate for both screening and monitoring progress.

Conclusion

As we noted at the outset of this article, efforts to understand the role of phonological awareness have far exceeded the efforts to relate research findings to classroom practice regarding phonological awareness. This article is an attempt to pull together the valuable information available on the role that phonological awareness plays in early reading development, the research-based teaching strategies that address the needs of all children, the instructional design principles that address the needs of children experiencing delays in early reading development, and the validated instruments available for screening and monitoring students' progress in phonological awareness.

Our description of the role that phonological awareness plays in reading development conspicuously fails to address the connection of phonological awareness and spelling. This failure is not an oversight, nor should it be perceived as a statement of our beliefs regarding the importance of spelling. We firmly believe that findings from spelling research (e.g., Ehri, 1998; Templeton, 1995; Treiman, 1993) represent such a significant part of our knowledge base about reading that they would go far beyond the length and scope of this article.

Recent research on phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, including how to teach and assess them, has made an extremely valuable contribution to our understanding of how to teach reading to children with learning disabilities or delays in early reading. It is not, however, a cure for reading disabilities, but a significant advance in preventing and correcting reading difficulties so that more children are prepared to learn how to read in our alphabetic writing system.

About the authors

David J. Chard, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at The University of Texas at Austin. His current interests include research in professional developmental in early reading and analysis of children's discourse in mathematics classrooms. Shirley V Dickson, PhD, is an assistant professor of special education at Northern Illinois University. Her interests are in research on phonological awareness and reading instruction and collaboration models in special education. Address: David J. Chard, University of Texas at Austin, Dept. of Special Education, SZB 408, Austin, TX 78712.

Appendix

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This article defines phonological awareness and discusses historic and contemporary research findings regarding its relation to early reading. Common misconceptions about phonological awareness are addressed. Research-based guidelines for teaching phonological awareness and phonemic awareness to all children are described. Additional instructional design guidelines are offered for teaching children with learning disabilities who are experiencing difficulties with early reading.

# data[].attributes.body
Assessments

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Phonological skill develops in a predictable progression. This concept is important, as it provides the basis for sequencing teaching tasks from easy to more difficult. Table 1 outlines the relative difficulty of phonological awareness tasks. Table 2 is a more specific synthesis of several research reviews and summaries (Adams et al., 1998; Gillon, 2004; Goswami, 2000; Paulson, 2004; Rath, 2001) that ties specific ages to the typical accomplishment of those phonological awareness tasks.

Prerequisite to phonological awareness is basic listening skill; the acquisition of a several-thousand word vocabulary; the ability to imitate and produce basic sentence structures; and the use of language to express needs, react to others, comment on experience, and understand what others intend.

Table 1. Phonological skills, from most basic to advanced

Word awareness

Tracking the words in sentences.

Note: This semantic language skill is much less directly predictive of reading than the skills that follow and less important to teach directly (Gillon, 2004). It is not so much a phonological skill as a semantic (meaning-based) language skill.

Responsiveness to rhyme and alliteration during word play

Enjoying and reciting learned rhyming words or alliterative phrases in familiar storybooks or nursery rhymes.

Syllable awareness

Counting, tapping, blending, or segmenting a word into syllables.

Onset and rime manipulation

The ability to produce a rhyming word depends on understanding that rhyming words have the same rime. Recognizing a rhyme is much easier than producing a rhyme.

Phoneme awareness

Identify and match the initial sounds in words, then the final and middle sounds (e.g., "Which picture begins with /m/?"; "Find another picture that ends in /r/").

Segment and produce the initial sound, then the final and middle sounds (e.g., "What sound does zoo start with?"; "Say the last sound in milk"; "Say the vowel sound in rope ").

Blend sounds into words (e.g., "Listen: /f/ /ē/ /t/. Say it fast").

Segment the phonemes in two- or three-sound words, moving to four- and five- sound words as the student becomes proficient (e.g., "The word is eyes. Stretch and say the sounds: /ī/ /z/").

Manipulate phonemes by removing, adding, or substituting sounds (e.g., "Say smoke without the /m/").

Table 2. Ages at which 80-90 percent of typical students have achieved a phonological skill

4

Rote imitation and enjoyment of rhyme and alliteration

pool, drool, tool
"Seven silly snakes sang songs seriously."

5

Rhyme recognition, odd word out

"Which two words rhyme:
stair, steel, chair?"

Recognition of phonemic changes in words

" Hickory Dickory Clock. That's not right!"

Clapping, counting syllables

5½

Distinguishing and remembering separate phonemes in a series

Show sequences of single phonemes with colored blocks: /s/ /s/ /f/; /z/ /sh/ /z/.

Producing a rhyme

"Tell me a word that rhymes with car." ( star)

Matching initial sounds; isolating an initial sound

"Say the first sound in ride (/r/); sock (/s/); love (/l/)."

6

Compound word deletion

"Say cowboy. Say it again, but don't say cow."

Syllable deletion

"Say parsnip. Say it again, but don't say par."

Phoneme segmentation of words that have simple syllables with two or three phonemes (no blends)

"Say the word as you move a chip for each sound."

6½

Phoneme segmentation of words that have up to three or four phonemes (include blends)

"Say the word slowly while you tap the sounds."

Phoneme substitution to build new words that have simple syllables (no blends)

"Change the /j/ in cage to /n/.
Change the /ā/ in cane to /ō/."

7

Sound deletion (initial and final positions)

"Say meat. Say it again, without the /m/."
"Say safe. Say it again, without the /f/."

8

Sound deletion (initial position, include blends)

"Say prank. Say it again, without the /p/."

9

Sound deletion (medial and final blend positions)

"Say snail. Say it again, without the /n/."
"Say fork. Say it again, without the /k/."

Paulson (2004) confirmed the hierarchy of phonological skill acquisition in 5-year-olds entering kindergarten. Only 7 percent of 5-year-olds who had not yet had kindergarten could segment phonemes in spoken words. The production of rhymes was more difficult for 5-year-olds than commonly assumed, as only 61 percent could give a rhyming word for a stimulus. Only 29 percent could blend single phonemes into whole words. Although some young students will pick up these skills with relative ease during the kindergarten year - especially if the curriculum includes explicit activities - other students must be taught these metalinguistic skills directly and systematically.

Moats, L, & Tolman, C (2009). Excerpted from Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS): The Speech Sounds of English: Phonetics, Phonology, and Phoneme Awareness (Module 2). Boston: Sopris West.

For more information on Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) visit Voyager Sopris .

For any reprint requests, please contact the author or publisher listed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Basic listening skills and "word awareness" are critical precursors to phonological awareness. Learn the milestones for acquiring phonological skills.

# data[].attributes.body
Initial Activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phonological Phonemic Awareness - PK - Rhymin Ralph Distinguish When Two Words Rhyme

# data[].attributes.body
Initial Activities

# data[].attributes.body
Initial Activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kids in pre-K and kindergarten can play with words, rhymes, and syllables they hear in everyday speech to prepare for reading. This is called phonological awareness.

Parents and caregivers can introduce phonological awareness during reading, singing, or play activities.

Kids who struggle with these kinds of activities may be showing early signs of reading issues.

There are a few ways kids in pre-K and kindergarten can get ready to read. One way is by noticing and playing with the words, rhymes, and syllables they hear in everyday speech. This called phonological awareness .

Kids also start to tune in to the individual sounds or phonemes in words. This is called phonemic awareness. The more you can build on these early "pre-reading" skills, the more prepared your child will be for the challenge of learning to read.

Good phonological awareness starts with kids picking up on sounds, syllables and rhymes in the words they hear. Read aloud to your child frequently. Choose books that rhyme or repeat the same sound. Draw your child's attention to rhymes: "Fox, socks, box! Those words all rhyme. Do you hear how they almost sound the same?"

It also helps to point out repeated sounds. For example, if you're reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, ask your child to listen to the /fffff/ sound in fish. (Really stretch the sounds out at first.) Outside of story time, try pointing out other words that start with the /fffff/ sound, just like in the book.

Ask your child to pick out the rhyming words in books without your help. Ask, "Did you hear a word that rhymes with fox?" Teach your child nursery rhymes and practice saying them together. Or say four short words, like log, cat, hog, frog. See if your child can pick out the word that doesn't rhyme.

Make syllables easier to understand by clapping the "beats" your child hears in words. Let's say you choose the word elephant. Pause as you say each syllable - e-le-phant - and clap out each syllable together. You can also get your child up and moving by having your child stomp or jump with each syllable.

Guessing games such as "I spy" can be used to work on almost any phonological skill. Want to practice noticing what sounds word begin with? Try "I spy something red that starts with /s/." Want to work on rhymes? "I'm wearing something warm that rhymes with boat."

Singing in general is a great way to get kids rhyming. There are also good songs teachers use to focus on other kinds of phonological and phonemic awareness skills. "Apples and Bananas" is a fun one. You can search online for more songs about phonemic awareness or ask your child's teacher for recommendations.

Sound blending is an important skill for early readers. They need to put sound units - phonemes - together to be able to read a word smoothly. You can help your child start working on this by putting together sounds of different words. Ask your child to connect the beginning sound with the rest of a word. For example, say, "Start with /p/ and add /ig/. What do word do you hear if you put them together?"

Have your child work on hearing a word and taking it apart. Start by using compound words such as cowboy, baseball or firefly. Tell your child, "Say the word cowboy. Now take away boy. What word is left?"

You can also use LEGO bricks to make this point. Give your child two attached LEGO bricks to represent parts of the word. Then have your child physically take the LEGO pieces apart while removing part of the word.

8. Get creative with crafts.

Kids respond to hands-on learning. Try making a collage of items that start with the same sound using pictures from magazines. Sock puppets can be another fun way to work on these skills. Make one that likes to munch on words that start with a certain sound. Let your child have fun "feeding" the puppet different objects or pictures that start with that sound.

There are many resources and ideas online to work on phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Check out YouTube for teaching videos, Pinterest for games and crafts, or the app store for nursery rhymes, sound games, and songs.

Whatever you do, keep the activities short and fun. If your child finds one activity too difficult or boring, try something different. If you find that activities of this type are too hard, talk to your classroom teacher . Your district's early childhood department may also be able to help you get extra help.

There are many ways to include sound play in your daily routine with your child.

Kids who play with sounds, syllables and rhymes when they are young are gaining important reading readiness skills.

If these skills are really difficult for your child, you may want to seek extra support in this area.

About the Author

About the Author

Kelli Johnson, MA is an educational speech-language pathologist, working with students from early childhood through 12th grade.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
9 ways to build phonological awareness in pre-K and kindergarten

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids in pre-K and kindergarten can play with words, rhymes, and syllables they hear in everyday speech to prepare for reading. This is called phonological awareness. Parents and caregivers can introduce phonological awareness during reading, singing, or play activities. Kids who struggle with these kinds of activities may be showing early signs of reading issues.

# data[].attributes.body
Assessments

# data[].attributes.body
Initial Activities

# data[].attributes.body
Initial Activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phonics Blending Song CVC Words and More

# data[].attributes.body
Accommodations – ELL

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
2. Teachers use systematic and explicit instruction to develop students’ phonemic awareness.

# data[].attributes.body
Accommodations – ELL

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Alphabet Worksheets for Kindergarten [Video] in 2020 | Teaching letter sounds, Letter sounds kindergarten, Phonological awareness activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aug 9, 2020 - Teaching letter sounds to kindergarten and first grade kids is such a fun topic! You can even introduce it to preschoolers and they "get it"...

# data[].attributes.body
Accommodations – Special Needs

# data[].attributes.body
Accommodations – Special Needs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By: ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation

Learning to read begins well before the first day of school. When Ron and Donna tell nursery rhymes to their baby, Mia, they are beginning to teach Mia to read. They are helping her to hear the similarities and differences in the sounds of words. She will begin to manipulate and understand sounds in spoken language, and she will practice this understanding by making up rhymes and new words of her own. She will learn the names of the letters and she will learn the different sounds each letter represents. As she gets a little older, Ron and Donna will teach her to write letters and numbers that she will already recognize by their shapes. Finally, she will associate the letters of the alphabet with the sounds of the words she uses when she speaks. At this point, she is on her way to learning to read!

When she tries to read books with her parents, at school, and on her own, Mia will learn how to learn new words by sounding them out. With more practice, she will begin to recognize familiar words easily and quickly, and she will know the patterns of spelling that appear in words and the patterns of words as they appear in sentences. She will be able to pay attention not just to the letters and words, but to the meanings they represent. Ultimately, Mia will be able to think about the meaning of the text as she reads.

Where does phonological awareness fit into this process?

Key to the process of learning to read is Mia's ability to identify the different sounds that make words and to associate these sounds with written words. In order to learn to read, Mia must be aware of phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest functional unit of sound. For example, the word cat contains three distinctly different sounds. There are 44 phonemes in the English language, including letter combinations such as /th/.

In addition to identifying these sounds, Mia must also be able to manipulate them. Word play involving segmenting words into their constituent sounds, rhyming words, and blending sounds to make words is also essential to the reading process. The ability to identify and manipulate the sounds of language is called phonological awareness.

Adams (1990) described five levels of phonological awareness ranging from an awareness of rhyme to being able to switch or substitute the components in a word. While phonological awareness affects early reading ability, the ability to read also increases phonological awareness (Smith, Simmons, & Kameenui, 1995).

Many children with learning disabilities have deficiencies in their ability to process phonological information. Thus, they do not readily learn how to relate letters of the alphabet to the sounds of language (Lyon, 1995). For all students, the processes of phonological awareness, including phonemic awareness, must be explicitly taught.

Children from culturally diverse backgrounds may have particular difficulties with phonological awareness. Exposure to language at home, exposure to reading at an early age, and dialect all affect the ability of children to understand the phonological distinctions on which the English language is built. Teachers must apply sensitive effort and use a variety of techniques to help children learn these skills when standard English is not spoken at home (Lyon, 1994).

How is phonological awareness taught?

To teach phonological awareness, begin by demonstrating the relationships of parts to wholes. Then model and demonstrate how to segment short sentences into individual words, showing how the sentence is made up of words. Use chips or other manipulatives to represent the number of words in the sentence. Once the students understand part-whole relationships at the sentence level, move on to the word level, introducing multisyllable words for segmentation into syllables. Finally, move to phoneme tasks by modeling a specific sound and asking the students to produce that sound both in isolation and in a variety of words and syllables.

It is best to begin with easier words and then move on to more difficult ones. Five characteristics make a word easier or more difficult (Kameenui, 1995):

1. The size of the phonological unit (e.g., it is easier to break sentences into words and words into syllables than to break syllables into phonemes).

2. The number of phonemes in the word (e.g., it is easier to break phonemically short words such as no, see and cap than snort, sleep or scrap).

3. Phoneme position in words (e.g., initial consonants are easier than final consonants and middle consonants are most difficult).

4. Phonological properties of words (e.g., continuant such as /s/ and /m/ are easier than very brief sounds such as /t/).

5. Phonological awareness challenges. (e.g., rhyming and initial phoneme identification are easier than blending and segmenting.)

Examples of phonological awareness tasks include phoneme deletion ("What word would be left if the /k/ sound were taken away from cat?"); Word to word matching ("Do pen and pipe begin with the same sound?"); Blending ("What word would we have if we blended these sounds together: /m/ /o/ /p/?"); phoneme segmentation ("What sounds do you hear in the word hot?"); phoneme counting ("How many sounds do you hear in the word cake?"); and rhyming ("Tell me all of the words that you know that rhyme with the word cat?") (Stanovich, 1994).

Beginning readers require more direct instructional support from teachers in the early stages of teaching. This is illustrated in the following example: The teacher models the sound or the strategy for making the sound, and has the children use the strategy to produce the sound. It is very important that the teacher model the correct sounds. This is done using several examples for each dimension and level of difficulty. The children are prompted to use the strategy during guided practice and more difficult examples are introduced. A sequence and schedule of opportunities for children to apply and develop facility with sounds should be tailored to each child's needs, and should be given top priority. Opportunities to engage in phonological awareness activities should be plentiful, frequent, and fun (Kameenui, 1995).
References
References

Adams, M.J. (1990) Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kameenui, E.J. (Winter, 1996). Shakespeare and beginning reading: The readiness is all. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 27 (2).

Lyon, G. R. (1995). Toward a definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 45, 3-27.

Lyon, G.R. (1994). Research In Learning Disabilities at the NICHD. Technical document. Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health.

Smith, S.B., Simmons, D.C., & Kameenui, E.J. (February, 1995). Synthesis of research on phonological awareness: Principles and implications for reading acquisition. (Technical Report no. 21, National Center to Improve the Tools of Education). Eugene: University of Oregon.

Stanovich, K.E. (1994). Romance and reality. The Reading Teacher, 47, 280-291.

A companion digest, #E539, and a companion ERIC minibibliography are available on request. ERIC Digests are in the public domain and may be freely reproduced and disseminated. This publication was prepared with funding from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, under contract no. RR93002005. The opinions expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the positions or policies of OERI or the Department of Education.

The ERIC Clearinghouse on Disabilities and Gifted Education, The Council for Exceptional Children, 1920 Association Drive Reston, VA 22091

ERIC Digest #E540 December 1995

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Beginning Reading and Phonological Awareness for Students with Learning Disabilities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LD OnLine is the leading website on learning disabilities, learning disorders and differences. Parents and teachers of learning disabled children will find authoritative guidance on attention deficit disorder, ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, dysnomia, reading difficulties, speech and related disorders.

# data[].attributes.body
Accommodations – Special Needs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Add to favorites
By Dr. Deborah Berrill, Professor Emeritus, School of Education & Professional Learning, Trent University and English LD Expert, LD@school
Many children who have learning disabilities (LDs) have difficulty in reading. There are multiple reasons for this, reminding us of the complexities of the neurobiological underpinnings of LDs and how brain differences affect learning.

One of the main reading difficulties people with LDs have is in decoding printed words. People without LDs often use a phonics approach to sound out unfamiliar words but that does not work as well for many people with LDs who have difficulty in phonological processing - that is, in hearing the different sounds in words. They may also have difficulty associating sounds with letters (Lyon, 1995). This, in turn, interferes not only with the ability to sound out unfamiliar words but it also strongly affects spelling - for how could someone spell a word accurately when they do not hear all of the sounds in the word?
Click here to read more about Literacy and LDs.
Phonological awareness includes not only hearing different sounds but also being able to manipulate sounds in words. This is not something that comes naturally to people: rather, the processes of phonological awareness must be explicitly taught. This is particularly important because in the early stages of reading, phonological awareness is the strongest predictor of reading progress (Stanovich, 1986).

Adams et al (1998) indicate that a child's level of phonological awareness at the end of kindergarten is one of the strongest predictors of future reading success. Yet they also note that "more than 20 percent of students struggle with some aspects of phonological awareness, while 8-10 percent exhibit significant delays. Early intervention is crucial and can make a real difference to students with limited levels of phonological awareness" ( Comprehensive Literacy Resource for Kindergarten Teachers. Chapter 2: Phonological Awareness).

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonological awareness includes the ability to identify and manipulate sounds in oral language, from parts of words to syllables and phrases. Phonological awareness thus refers to a wide range of skills. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness focusing just on the smallest units of sound in human speech. These units are called phonemes and phonemes form the sound system of a given language. The same phonemic principles apply whether the language is English or French, Greek or Chinese.

In English, although we have 26 letters in our alphabet, there are 44 phonemes (sounds) because some letters have more than one sound. For example, the letter 'a' represents one sound or phoneme in the word bat and a different phoneme in the word baby; similarly, the letter 'c' represents one sound in the word cup and a different sound in the word city. Additionally, some letters form a completely new sound when they are put together, such as 'th' in the word the or 'ch' in the word chat. For a complete list of phonemes in the English language, please click here to visit the Reading Well website.

Phonemic awareness relates to the ability to hear and identify individual phonemes. Citing multiple research studies, Bryant et al (2014: 211) note the strong "connection between young children's awareness of phonological segments, particularly of phonemes, and their progress in learning to read (Badian, 1994; Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Cardoso-Martins & Pennington, 2004; de Jong & van der Leij, 1999; Ehri et al., 2001; Muter & Snowling, 1998; Parrila, Kirby, & McQuarrie, 2004)." Many other studies consistently confirm that phonemic awareness along with letter recognition are the two best early predictors of reading success, and more recent studies have demonstrated that phonemic awareness skills influence children's broader academic success throughout most of their schooling (Blomert & Csépe, 2012; Bryant et al, 2014; Vaessen & Blomert, 2010).

Phonemic Awareness Skills

In reading, we are interested in a child's ability to distinguish the sounds in three different locations: at the beginning of words; at the end of words; and in the middle of words. Each of these is a different skill. Once these three skills are mastered, the child needs to learn how to blend sounds together to make a full word. As words becomes more complex, more complex phonemic awareness skills are needed.

There are five different types of phonemic skills of importance. These are outlined on the Reading Rockets website and include the following:

Phoneme matching - the ability to identify words that begin with the same sound.

Phoneme isolation - the ability to isolate a single sound from within a word.

Phoneme blending - the ability to blend individual sounds into a word.

Phoneme segmentation - the ability to break a word into individual sounds.

Phoneme manipulation - the ability to modify, change, or move the individual sounds in a word.

Unfortunately, many people with LDs have difficulty developing these skills. It is important to understand these skills and to recognize if a child is having difficulty with them. Teachers - and family, too - need to understand that if this is the case, it is not because the child is not trying. Rather, it is because the physiology of a child's brain makes the task extremely difficult.

Assessment FOR Learning in Phonemic Awareness

Teachers and parents can do some informal exploration of a child's phonemic awareness, starting with an exploration of their ability to segment - or isolate - sounds in short words. Let the child know that you are going to play a word game. Then tell them that you are going to say a word and they have to tell you the first sound in that word (Weiner, 1994). E.g., "What sound do you hear at the beginning of the word pat?" (/p/). This would be followed by asking, "What sound do you hear at the end of the word pat?" (/t/).

We start with the initial sound in a word first - that is the easiest. Then we ask for the last sound. If the child can do both of those, then ask, "What sound do you hear in the middle of the word pat?" (/a/). More complex versions of these skills would involve identifying consonant blends such as bl, tr, sp, at the beginning, at the end and in the middle of words.

Other tasks that help us understand a child's phonemic awareness abilities include the following:

Phoneme deletion: "What word would be left if the /k/ sound were taken away from cat?" Or, at a more difficult level, "Say the word 'play.' Now say it again but don't say /p/."

Word to word matching: "Do pen and pipe begin with the same sound?"

Blending of sounds: "What word would we have if we blended these sounds together: /m/ /o/ /p/?")

Phoneme segmentation: "What sounds do you hear in the word 'hot'?"

Phoneme counting: "How many sounds do you hear in the word 'cake'?" (Three: /k/ /ā/ /k/)

Rhyming: "Tell me all of the words that you know that rhyme with the word 'cat'."

(Stanovich, 1994).

A child may be able to do phoneme deletion relatively easily with short words but they may have more difficulty with longer words or deletions that are not at the beginning or end of the word. (E.g., "Say the word 'stale.' Now say it again, but don't say /l/.") Phonemic awareness skills are on a continuum from less complex skills, like rhyming, to more complex skills such as deletion of medial sound (sounds in the middle of words) or blends. The latter might include a task such as "Say the word 'stale.' Now say it again but don't say /t/."

The Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis Skills can be a helpful starting point. Children should be able to respond correctly to the following by the end of Grade 3.

Phonemic Awareness of Phoneme Deletion: The Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis Skills (1993) (Click here to view the Test of Auditory Analysis Skills.)

There are multiple phonemic awareness assessment tools supported by research that can be used beginning in Kindergarten and going through higher grades, including the Rosner Test of Auditory Analysis Skills (Rosner, 1993), the Test of Phonological Awareness-Kindergarten (TOPA-K; Torgesen & Bryant, 1993), the Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation (Yopp, 1995) and the Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, DIBELS (Kaminski & Good, 1996). Click here to access a full list of research-supported phonemic awareness measures on the LD Online website. Having evidence to know whether or not a child has difficulty with phonological processing is essential in knowing how to best meet their needs.

If a child has difficulty with phonemic awareness, it is important to talk with the Special Education Resource Teacher at your school. They can do additional assessment and together you can plan what type of explicit instruction in auditory analysis the child will receive.

Blending Phonemes

Once a child is able to isolate sounds, they need to learn to blend those sounds together. The child would be asked, "What word do we have if we blend together the following sounds: /p/ /a/ /t/ ?" Like other phonemic awareness skills, this often needs to be taught through modelling and blending the word orally with the child. The initial slow blending needs to be done increasingly quickly so the child can hear the full word properly. What is particularly heartening is that we know that phonemic awareness training, where children are taught how to blend sounds and how to delete sounds, can be extremely effective and subsequently makes a significant difference in reading ability (e.g., Rosner, 1974; Weiner, 1994). With children who have learning disabilities, this training needs to be explicit and intensive in order to be effective.

Phonemic awareness skills of isolating and blending sounds in simple words are usually mastered by Grade 1. And the ability to manipulate phonemes is usually mastered by the end of Grade 1 or early Grade 2. For a full list of ages at which specific segmentation and manipulation skills are typically mastered, click here to visit the Reading Rockets website.

Where Does Phonics Fit In?

Phonics is an approach to reading that involves the association of sounds to written letters and includes "sounding out" unfamiliar words. A large body of research confirms that readers who can use a phonics approach by sounding out unfamiliar words are more successful readers. Yet many people with LDs have great difficulty in being able to use a phonics approach either because they cannot the different sounds (phonological awareness) or they may have difficulty in blending sounds together. Nagy, Berninger and Abbott (2006: 136) note that "an increasing body of research has documented how a variety of symptoms of reading disability can be traced to a basic phonological deficit (e.g., Adams, 1990; Morris et al., 1998; Olson, Wise, Conners, Rack, & Fulker, 1989; Shankweiler et al., 1995; Stanovich, 1986)." This challenge makes a phonics approach to reading almost useless to them.

The longstanding findings of the effectiveness of explicit teaching of phonics was again re-affirmed in a recent thee-year pilot project launched by New York City in 2008 with 700 children in ten low income schools. Results were matched with 350 children in ten demographically similar schools who did not receive the same instruction. Students who received explicit phonics teaching showed significantly greater gains than children who did not in word identification, word attack, comprehension and spelling as measured by the Woodcock-Johnson III assessment.

Metacognition Is Needed Along With Phonemic Awareness

For many aspiring readers, learning phonemic awareness skills is not enough in itself to improve reading (Weiner 1994). Instead, as both Cunningham (1986) and Wittrock (1986) emphasize, it is critical to teach children how to think about their reading - using metacognition or thinking about one's thinking - and to train them regarding when and why to use various segmentation and blending strategies to decode new words.

A number of reading software programs and reading approaches incorporate metacognitive strategies. These include the Empower TM reading program ( click here to learn more about EmpowerTM) and Lexia Core 5 R software ( click here to learn more about Lexia Core 5R), programs which are highly recommended by Ontario Provincial Demonstration Schools for students with LDs. For instance, Empower TM teaches five different decoding strategies and children explain which strategies they will use in decoding specific words. This metacognitive awareness of what strategies are being used is helpful because if those strategies don't work with a particular word, the child can purposefully choose a different strategy. This teaches them that different strategies may be more helpful for decoding different words and helps them from getting stuck in their reading.

Summary: Phonological Approaches to Reading

1. Phonemic awareness, the ability to hear and distinguish different sounds in words, has been directly correlated with reading success and achievement.

2. Children with learning disabilities are often unable to distinguish sounds or to manipulate them, making a phonics approach to reading untenable for them.

3. Explicit and intensive teaching of phonemic skills along with metacognitive awareness of when to use the different skills has proven to be successful for children who were previously unable to master these skills.

Morphological Analysis: A Complementary Approach to Strengthening Reading
Whereas phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language, morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language - either in whole words or in parts of words. Morphology, the study of morphemes, explains the basis for our spelling system. People may understand morphology best when thinking about affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and root words: these are the three types of morphemes.

For instance, the word unzipped has three morphemes: the prefix un- which means "not" or "opposite;" the root or base word zip; and the suffix - ed which indicates that this was an action done in the past. Understanding morphology helps a reader determine the meaning of an unfamiliar word by enabling the reader to segment, or break down, a word into its root word and its affixes. This also helps readers better understand meaning and also spelling.

Understanding that root words in English come from a variety of languages, including Greek, Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon, helps explain the logic behind what may seem like random differences between the spelling of different words. Research has established that knowing root words, prefixes and suffixes helps readers gain control over decoding and improves reading success as well as broader success at school (Bryant et al, 2014; Nagy et al, 2006; Wolf & Kennedy, 2003). The work of Hurry et al (2006) also demonstrates that learning about morphemes results in improvements in students' spelling.

A morphological approach thus not only complements a phonemic approach to decoding but it is of tremendous help for people who have difficulty with the phonics approach as it does not rely on the ability to hear the sounds in words. Rather, a morphological approach relies on recognizing and understanding the meanings of root words and affixes.

Unfortunately, research in North America and in England shows that some teachers do not know what morphemes are and that many who do know about them do not understand their importance for reading and spelling (Hurry et al, 2006; Wolf & Kennedy, 2003). As a result, teaching students about morphemes often does not occur or occurs only incidentally rather than explicitly (Snow, Griffin & Burns, 2005). The ramifications of this have particularly negative impact for students with LDs, many of whom have phonological challenges.
Supporting Morphemic Awareness at School
Morphemic awareness is something that should be part of regular teaching practice. Explicit teaching of common prefixes, suffixes and root words should be part of the introduction of new words and new topics.

These words should then be posted, either on chart paper with the name of the unit/topic at the top of the paper, or on a word wall. Prefixes will all be written in one colour, the suffixes in a different colour and the root words in a third colour. For example:

prefixes in green (like the "go" colour on a traffic light, signaling the beginning of the word)

suffixes in red ("stop" on a traffic light, signaling the end of the word)

Keep reviewing learned affixes and slowly add new ones. According to Honig et al (2000), the four most common prefixes in English (dis-, in/im-, re- and un-) account for 97% of prefixed words printed in school English, and the same is true for the four most common suffixes (-ed, -ing, -ly, -s/es).

Students will enjoy a game that reinforces prefixes and suffixes and root words that can be played at least once a week.
Click here to access a lesson plan for a morpheme awareness game entitled Build-a-Word Game.
Morphology is powerful, for those who know morphemes understand that the meanings of words are predictable from the meanings of their parts (Nagy & Anderson, 1984). Bear et al (2004) have shown that knowledge of morphemes is essential for accuracy in spelling and Nagy et al (2006) have shown that since almost all longer words are made up of numerous morphemes, understanding of morphemes contributes to fluency in the recognition of more complex words. Kirby and Bowers (2012) emphasize that "morphology works" as it helps increase vocabulary knowledge and understanding and it predicts reading development and achievement.

The earliest approaches to reading are sound/letter correspondences and phonological awareness training. Morphological approaches, however, can begin quite early as well.

Morphological approaches to reading make a distinct contribution to reading success by grade 4 and the impact increases as students get older and words get longer and more complex (Nagy et al, 2006).
Challenges Become Greater with Each Passing Year
More than 30 years ago, Stanovich (1986:379) noted that the "growing body of data indicates that variation in vocabulary knowledge is a causal determinant of differences in reading comprehension ability (Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982; McKeown, Beck, Omanson & Perfetti, 1983; Stahl, 1983)." By grade 4, children whose vocabulary knowledge is below grade level are likely to have difficulties in reading comprehension (Biemiller & Boote, 2006).

The challenges only become greater and more profound with each passing year. Since reading is difficult for most children with LDs, they read significantly less than children reading at grade level expectations. This difference in the amount of reading that occurs has ramifications on vocabulary development, access to new information, and learning in all academic areas. We have known this for more than 30 years. In 1984, Nagy and Anderson wrote that the children who are least motivated to read "in the middle grades might read 100,000 words a year while the average children at this level might read 1,000,000. The figure for the voracious middle-grade reader might be 10,000,000 or even as high as 50,000,000. If these guesses are anywhere near the mark, there are staggering individual differences in the volume of language experience, and therefore, an opportunity to learn new words (p. 328)." This has been reinforced by Juel & Minden-Cupp (2000) and affects learning new ideas across all subject areas.

Stanovich (1986) referred to the cumulative effect of reading challenges as "the Matthew effect," which comes from the notion that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. With this analogy, Stanovich emphasizes that the learning and knowledge gap between poor readers and good readers continues to grow and grow over time, further disenfranchising poorer readers with every passing year.

Research confirms what Stanovich (1986) indicated: the learning and knowledge gap between poor readers and good readers grows and grows over time because poor readers read less - and learn less - and good readers read more - and more complex text - with each passing year.

However, this does not need to happen. A large body of research demonstrates the powerfulness of explicit training in phonological awareness - even at grades 9 and 10. This combined with the complementary approach of morphological awareness makes a significant and life-changing impact on students who have been struggling in reading (Nagy et al, 2006).

References:

Adams, M. J., Foorman, B.R., Lundberg, I. and Beeler, T. (1998) Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum. Paul Brookes Publishing Co.

Beck, S., Condy, J. L. (2017). Instructional principals used to teach critical comprehension skills to a Grade 4 learner. Reading & Writing. Capetown. Vol. 8, Iss. 1.

Berninger, V., Nagy, W., Carlisle, J. Thomson, J., Hoffer, D., Abbott, S., and Aylward, E. (2003). Effective treatment for dyslexics in grade 4 to 6. In B. Foorman (Ed.,), Preventing and remediating reading difficulties: Bringing science to scale (pp. 382-417). Timonium, MD: York Press.

Biemiller, A., & Boote, C. (2006). An effective method for building meaning vocabulary in primary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 44-62.

Blomert, L., & Cs epe, V. (2012). Psychological foundations of reading acquisition and assessment. In B. Csapo & V. Csépe (Eds.), Framework for diagnostic assessment of reading (pp. 17-78). Budapest, Hungary: Nemzeti Tanko€nyvkiado .

Bowers, P.N., Kirby, J. R. & Deacon, S. H. (2010). The effects of morphological instruction on literacy skills: A systematic review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 80, 144-179.

Bowers, P. N., & Kirby, J. R. (2010). Effects of morphological instruction on vocabulary acquisition. Re ading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 23, 515-537.

Bryant, P., Nunes, T., & Barros, R. (2014). The connection between children's knowledge and use of grapho‐phonic and morphemic units in written text and their learning at school. The British Journal of Educational Psychology, 84 (2), 211-225.

Cunningham, A. E. (1986). Phonemic awareness: The development of early reading competency. Un-published doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology, 33 , 934-945.

D'Angelo, Nadia Marie. Understanding the language bases of poor reading comprehension in English and French. PhD dissertation. Dissertation Abstracts International.

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Willows, D. M., Schuster, B. V., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z. and Shanahan, T. (2001), Phonemic Awareness Instruction Helps Children Learn to Read: Evidence From the National Reading Panel's Meta-Analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 36, 250-287. doi:10.1598/RRQ.36.3.2

ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation. (1995). Beginning reading and phonological awareness for students with learning disabilities. ERIC Digest #E540. Accessed Dec. 5, 2017.
http://www.ldonline.org/article/6280/
Hart, B. & Risley, T. (2003). The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap. American Educator, 27, 4-9.

Hendrix, R. A; Griffin & Robert A. (2017). "Rooting" on Adolescents. Literacy Today. Newark. Vol. 35 (3), 36-37.

Honig, B., Diamond, L. and Gutlohn, L. (2000.) Teaching Reading Sourcebook: For Kindergarten Through Eighth Grade. Arena Press.

Hurry, J., Curno, T., Parker, M., & Pretzlik, U. (2006). An intervention program for classroom teaching about morphemes; effects on the children's vocabulary. In T. Nunes & P. Bryant (Eds.), Improving literacy by teaching morphemes (pp. 134-154). London, UK: Routledge.

Juel, C. (1988). Learning to Read and Write: A Longitudinal Study of Fifty-four Children from First through Fourth Grade. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80, 437-447.

Juel, C. & Minden-Cupp C. (2000). One down and 80,000 to go: Word recognition instruction in the primary grades. The Reading Teacher, 53(4), 332-335.

Kaminski, R. A., & Good, R. H., 111 (1996). Toward a technology for assessing basic early literacy skills. School Psychology Review, 25, 215- 227.

Kirby, J.R. & Bowers, P.N. (2012). Morphology Works. What Works? Research Into Practice. Research Monograph 41. Ontario: Ministry of Education. http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/WW_Morphology.pdf

Lyon, G. R. (1995). Toward a definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 45, 3-27.

McCutchen, Deborah; Logan, Becky. (2011). Inside Incidental Word Learning: Children's Strategic Use of Morphological Information to Infer Word Meanings. Reading Research Quarterly; Vol. 46 (4), 334-349.

Nagy, W.E. & Anderson, R.C. (1984). How many words are there in printed school English? Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 304-330.

Nagy, W., Berninger, V.W. & Abbot, R. (2006). Contributions of morphology beyond phonology to literacy outcomes of upper elementary and middle-school students. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 134-147.

Nunes, T. & Bryant, P. (2006). Improving literacy by teaching morphemes. New York, NY: Routledge.

Rosner, J., & Simon, D.P. (1971). The Auditory Analysis Test: An initial report. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 4, 384-392.

Rosner, J. (1974). Auditory analysis training with prereaders. The Reading Teacher, 27, 379-384.

Rosner, J. (1993). Helping children overcome learning difficulties. 3rd ed. New York: Walker and Company.

Savage, R., & Carless, S. (2004). Predicting curriculum and test performance at age 7 years from pupil background, baseline skills and phonological awareness at age 5. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 155-171. doi:10.1348/000709904773839815

Shapiro, L.R. & Solity, J. (2016). Differing effects of two synthetic phonics programmes on early reading development. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 86, 182-203.

Snow, C.E., Griffin, P. & Burns, M. S. (Eds.) (2005). Knowledge to support the teaching of reading: Preparing teachers for a changing world. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, 21, 360-407.

Stanovich, K.E. (1994). Romance and reality. The Reading Teacher, 47 (4), 280-291.

Torgesen, J. K., & Bryant, B. R. (1993). Test of phonological awareness. Austin, TX: PRO-ED.

Torgerson, C. J., Brooks, G., & Hall, J. (2006). A systematic review of the research literature on the use of phonics in the teaching of reading and spelling (DfES Research Rep. 711). London, UK: Department for Education and Skills. Retrieved from: http://webarchive.nationalarchives. gov.uk/20130401151715/http://www.education.gov.uk/publications.

Vaessen, A., & Blomert, L. (2010). Long-term cognitive dynamics of fluent reading development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 105( 3), 213-231.

Weiner, S. (1994). Effects of phonemic awareness training on low- and middle-achieving first graders' phonemic awareness and reading ability. Journal of Reading Behavior, 26 (3), 277-300.

Wolf, M. & Kennedy, R. (2003). How the origins of written language instruct us to teach A response to Steven Strauss. Educational Researcher, 32(2), 26-30.

Yopp, H. K. (1995). A test for assessing phonemic awareness in young children. The Reading Teacher, 49, 20-29

Web Resources
Click here to access the Reading Rockets website and learn about phonological and phonemic awareness. Click here to visit the LDonline website and access the article, "Beginning Reading and Phonological Awareness for Students with Learning Disabilities". Click here to access the Saskatchewan Learning Resource, "Teaching Students with Reading Difficulties and Disabilities: A Guide for Educators".
Click here to visit the Core Knowledge website.
Click here to access the Comprehensive Literacy Resource for Kindergarten Teachers, Chapter 2: Phonological Awareness. Click here to visit the Reading Well website and access the article, "The 44 Phonemes in English". Click here to visit the Reading Rockets website and access the article, "Phonemic Awareness Assessment". Click here to visit the LDonline website and access the article, "Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines". Click here to visit the Sick Kids website and learn more about EmpowerTM Reading. Click here to visit the Lexia website and access the article, "Lexia Reading Core5". Click here to access the graphic organizer "Most Common Prefixes" on the Scholastic website. Click here to access the graphic organizer "The 20 Most Common Prefixes in the Academic Texts" on the Centre for Development & Learning website.
Phonemic Awareness Games
Click here to visit the Reading by Phonics website to access videos, learning guides, and learning activities related to phonics. Click here to visit the Top Notch Teaching website and access the article, "4 Useful Strategies to Improve Phoneme Manipulation".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Learning to Read: The Importance of Both Phonological and Morphological Approaches

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Dr. Deborah Berrill, Professor Emeritus, School of Education & Professional Learning, Trent University and English LD Expert, LD@school Many children who have learning disabilities (LDs) have difficulty in reading. There are multiple reasons for this, reminding us of the complexities of the neurobiological underpinnings of LDs and how brain differences affect learning.

# data[].attributes.body
Accommodations – Special Needs

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mastering Phonological Awareness for First Grade Common Core - Elementary Nest | Phonics activities, Phonics, Kids learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jun 2, 2019 - Find fantastic resources for mastering Phonological Awareness in the classroom. Featuring ideas like mini lessons, activities, anchor charts, and more.

# data[].attributes.body
Accommodations – ELL

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phoneme Segmentation & Blending Made Easy - One Sharp Bunch in 2020 | Phonemic awareness activities, Phonemic awareness, Guided reading kindergarten

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Oct 1, 2020 - Phoneme Segmentation & Blending Made Easy Phoneme segmentation & blending made easy with these tips and tricks for small group instruction! These are the perfect phonemic awareness activities for your guided reading lessons or literacy centers! Check out this color coded trick for teaching directionality and segmenting with CVC words! #phonemicawareness #cvcwords

# data[].attributes.body
Initial Activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Rhyming Words Game | Rhyming Song for Kids | Reading & Writing Skills | Jack Hartmann

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Phonological Awareness for ESL/ELL Students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Where do you begin building phonological awareness with ESL and ELL students? Dual-language learners have special needs, but there are tricks to help them.

# data[].attributes.body
Remediation/ Reteaching Activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Learning to read can be quite an overwhelming task for small children. In fact, if you think about it, it's astounding that children are even capable of learning to read in such a short amount of time. However, before they begin to read print, they must have an adequate foundational understanding of how sounds in words work. That is where phonemic awareness comes into play.

What is phonemic awareness?

In easy-to-understand terms, phonemic awareness is the ability to identify, think about, and manipulate sounds in spoken speech. This is NOT the same as phonics. Phonemic awareness is actually a critical skill that is a precursor to reading letters. That's why phonemic awareness instruction should NEVER involve print. If you find yourself working with letters or printed words, then you have skipped a step and crossed the line into phonics. This is a very important point. Research tells us that it's essential to focus on phonemic awareness in the classroom before reading can begin. We want to ensure that children have a solid understanding of the sounds of speech before we start phonics instruction.

Nowadays, we are facing an added difficulty, though. In today's early-childhood classrooms, teachers are feeling an ever-increasing pressure to get their students reading. It is easy to lose sight of the developmental process and try to skip steps in order to get our kids reading books as soon as possible. There is just one problem: skipping steps is not going to work. Children's progress in reading will be limited if they haven't learned to think about the sounds in words.

As early childhood teachers, we need to remember that we can't skip past phonemic awareness skills. We can't just barge ahead in the hope that all of our students have arrived in our classroom complete with the full-blown skills of thinking about and manipulating sounds in their minds. On the other hand, we also can't afford to spend a lot of time doing phonemic-awareness instruction. I am happy to tell you the good news that we don't have to! Phonemic awareness instruction can and should be done in small pockets of time throughout the school day. In fact, oral language and phonemic awareness can often be taught and reinforced in as little as five to ten minutes per day.

Here are five quick, easy, and fun phonemic awareness activities that are perfect for the beginning of the school year in any early childhood classroom. Yes, you heard me correctly - that word was F-U-N. I know fun has become an undesirable notion in many schools today. But I assure you that these activities will be fun and that your students really will learn about our amazing language! I have also included activities that require little or no preparation - things you can do on the fly! Although these activities don't cover the full range of phonemic awareness skills needed to produce great readers, they are still fantastic activities to begin any school year!

Listening

The ability to listen closely is a key ingredient of phonemic awareness. This is the part of instruction that is skipped most often, because teachers assume that young children know how to listen. They may not! Furthermore, if they don't, they're not ignoring you. It's just that they don't understand what "listen closely" means. They have to be taught.

The Listening Game.

One of the first phonemic-awareness activities I do with my students, even as soon as the first day, is to bring their attention to noises. After lunch, we come back to the classroom and all the children lie quietly on the floor. It's not naptime, but it's a great time to unwind, which is important for young children. As we lie there quietly for five to ten minutes, we listen for sounds. We all stay perfectly still and quiet. We become "sound spotters." We don't use our eyes - we use our ears. There are always sounds and weird noises you can hear in a school building. We may hear the air conditioner, doors closing, teachers talking, stomachs growling. The possibilities are endless! Your part is to talk about the sounds you and the children hear. Use a little teacher enthusiasm and exaggeration to get the kids interested in this activity. The key phrase is, "Who can spot a sound with their ears?"

"Moo-Moo," Where Are You?

I love playing this game with my class. The kids have a ball, too. In fact, they simply think we are playing.

How to play: All the children sit in a circle. One child lies down in the middle of the circle and covers his or her eyes. The teacher chooses another child to go somewhere in the room and pretend to be a cow by making a "moo-moo" sound. The child in the middle of the circle - with eyes still covered - points in the direction of the animal sound. This game is great because it gets children to listen closely for sounds and for where the sounds are coming from. It also prepares their ears to listen more closely to sounds in words. When the child in the middle correctly identifies the sound and direction, he or she gets to go next and make a different animal sound.

Rhyming

Rhyming is such a great phonemic awareness activity! Most children easily grasp the concept of rhyme. Some need a little help, though. Using word-play with rhyming helps children notice that sounds in our language have meaning and follow certain patterns. Again, this is a precursor skill to seeing sound patterns reproduced in print - as a phonemic awareness practice, it is purely auditory.

The absolute best way to introduce rhyming to your students is by reading lots of fun rhyming books, poems, and songs. Act silly and have fun! The more fun you have with the rhymes, the more the kids will notice the rhymes and enjoy the activities. Exaggerate the silliness of the rhyme. The poem "Down By the Bay" and the book "Silly Sally" are perfect examples of how rhyme can be super fun!

In My Box

This game is great to use after your students have at least some understanding of how rhyming works. That means you have already read lots of rhyming books, poems, and songs and played with those rhyming words.

How to play: Get a small box and place some pictures in it with pairs of familiar words that rhyme (like box/socks, cat/hat, or chair/bear). Use enough pictures so that everyone in your class has a turn. Sit in a circle with your students. Start with a child you know is strong in rhyming. Hold the box and choose a picture. If the picture shows a cat, say "In my box, there's a cat". Call on him or her to come up with a rhyming word. The child might say, "In my box, there's a hat" (or some other rhyming word). After he or she answers with a rhyming word, hand him or her the box. Now he or she gets to choose a card and continue the play.

Syllables

Working with and noticing syllables within words is important, because it makes students aware of how words can be split up into smaller parts, according to their sounds. Our ultimate goal is to work on individual phonemes (vowels or consonants), but children must first learn the concept of "parts of words." It's easier for young children to start with larger parts of words and then work their way down to the smaller, discrete individual sounds of phonemes. We are building a bridge from hearing words to hearing phonemes.

Bippity Boppity Bumble Bee

This is such a fun game. You get the kids clapping out names, first. As they get used to the game, you can start using other words with more syllables.

How to play: Sit in a circle with your students. I have a little stuffed bee that the kids love to hold. You could also use a printable bumble bee. The teacher begins the chant and walks around to a child:

Teacher: "Bippity Boppity Bumble Bee, Will You Say Your Name For Me?"

The child responds, "Jennifer."

Teacher: " Let's all say it." And the class says her name out loud, while clapping once for each syllable.

Teacher: "Let's all whisper it." And the class whispers her name, while quiet-clapping the syllables again, once per syllable.

Teacher and class: "Bippity Boppity Bumble Bee, Thank You For Saying Your Name For Me!"

Repeat with another student and his/her name. As students become familiar with the game, you can allow students to take on the "teacher" role.

Old MacDonald

Here is another great game that you can use to give the students practice in listening to syllables and putting them together into words. It follows the pattern of the song, Old MacDonald. By the time I use this activity with my class, we have read and sung Old MacDonald hundreds of times, so the song is well-known to the students.

How to play: The teacher begins by telling the students they are going to learn a new game - it's a different version of Old MacDonald, and it's kind of a silly version. The teacher begins singing, "Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O. And on that farm he had a /ti/ /ger/, E-I-E-I-O". Of course, the kids think the introduction of the tiger is wildly funny, but notice what they have actually done: Without being told, they have mentally combined the syllables /ti/ and /ger/ to realize what the animal was! It's huge! Then I show the children a picture of a tiger and they feel proud that they figured out the animal - and they think it's too funny! Again it's lots of fun, and they really think we are just playing a game.

The most important thing to keep in mind as an early childhood teacher is that phonemic awareness can be such a fun time! It shouldn't be long drawn-out lessons. All you need is five-to-ten-minute pockets of time each day. Phonemic awareness activities are also great to use during transition times throughout the day. I often use the ten minutes before lunch, and sometimes during group restroom breaks, to practice and reinforce listening and oral language skills. And the payoff is big! If you give phonemic awareness the attention it deserves, your students will be richly rewarded when it's time for them to start reading!

So now you know some of my secrets - the teaching games I use myself! I've had success with them, so I'm sure that if you make them your own, not only will you have fun with them in your classroom, but your students, too, will have an easier time with reading and go further faster!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 Quick, Easy, and Fun Phonemic Awareness Activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learning to read can be quite an overwhelming task for small children. In fact, if you think about it, it's astounding that children are even capable of learning to read in such a short amount of time. However, before they begin to read print, they must have an adequate foundational understanding of how sounds in words work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
word pairs i: take a sound away (analysis)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Research shows that the very notion that spoken language is made up of sequences of little sounds does not come naturally or easily to human beings. The small units of speech that correspond to letters of an alphabetic writing system are called phonemes.

# data[].attributes.body
Remediation/ Reteaching Activities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teaching Tools | Resources for Teachers from Scholastic

# data[].attributes.body
Remediation/ Reteaching Activities

# data[].attributes.body
Remediation/ Reteaching Activities

# data[].attributes.body
Remediation/ Reteaching Activities