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The concept of print refers to the child's understanding of how print works, including book handling, text directionality, and the relationship between spoken and written language. Milestones include recognizing the front and back of the book, following the text from left to right, understanding that print carries meaning, and distinguishing between letters and words (Learning A-Z, 2025).

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Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in spoken language. This critical pre-reading skill develops in stages, leading to proficient reading and spelling. There are four states of phonological awareness, and specific milestones indicate mastery.

The first stage is word awareness, rhyming, and alliteration. Students must be able to count words, identify and produce rhyming words, and discriminate and provide examples of alliteration to master stage one.

The second stage is all about syllables. To master this stage, students will need to be able to blend and segment syllables in a word.

The third stage is onset and rime. To master this, students must identify, produce, and blend the onset of the word and the rime of the word.

The final stage is phonemic awareness. To move on to this stage with a student or class, they have to master the previous stages. To master this stage, you must add, delete, and substitute sounds in a word.

(Reading Rockets - Phonological Awareness Assessment, n.d.)

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Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and work with phonemes. Foundational skills include the ability to isolate sounds, identify sounds in words, blend sounds to make a syllable, segment sounds, and manipulate sounds through addition, subtraction, or substitution (Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: In Depth | Reading Rockets, n.d.). It is important to remember that phonemic awareness is solely based on sounds in spoken speech, not writing.

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Letter naming knowledge is the ability to identify the letters. Milestones for letter naming are being able to identify their printed shapes in uppercase and lowercase letters as well as their sounds.

(Reading Rockets Basic Alphabet Knowledge, n.d)

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Concepts of print can start developing in babies, but children become more aware of it in preschool through kindergarten (ages 3-6). By the end of kindergarten, most children should demonstrate a solid understanding of print concepts (Reading Rockets, n.d.).

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When kids begin to be phonologically aware, they develop very quickly, especially in the classroom.

Word awareness is typically mastered at about age 3.

Rhyme and Syllable blending are mastered at about age 4.

Syllable segmentation and deletion are to be mastered by the end of kindergarten.

Onset and rime is typically mastered in the middle of kindergarten but needs to be learned by the end of kindergarten.

(Reading Rockets - Phonological Awareness Assessment, n.d.)

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Students start to develop phonemic awareness around pre-k to kindergarten; however, most students will typically master phonemic awareness by the end of first grade.

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Letter naming can start developing before children go to school, around age 2-3, because they may start to be more familiar with their name, or their parents can sing the alphabet song to them. Students should master letter naming by the end of kindergarten.

(reading.com, 2024)

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A teacher gives a student a book and asks the student to point to specific book elements (Reading Rockets, n.d.). Examples include the front cover, a letter, a word, or punctuation marks. This assesses awareness of book handling and text organization. An informal assessment could be during a shared reading session, the teacher observes whether students engage with print concepts, such as pointing to words while reading, recognizing punctuation marks, or identifying capital and lowercase letters. This informal strategy allows teachers to assess students in a natural reading environment and note improvements in their understanding of print concepts.

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Teachers can use an official Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST) to assess phonological awareness. PAST evaluates 14 aspects of phonological awareness, including phoneme-level skills, helping teachers identify areas needing improvement (Kilpatrick, 2024).

Teachers can also use an informal strategy to assess students' phonological awareness by identifying areas where reading skills need improvement. Elkonin Boxes help students segment words into individual sounds by moving tokens into designated spaces, providing a visual and hands-on way to manipulate phonemes. This technique and more formal assessments offer valuable insights into students' progress in foundational literacy skills, allowing educators to tailor instruction to meet individual learning needs (Reading Rockets - Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: In Practice, n.d.)

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An evidence-based assessment strategy that can be used to assess phonemic awareness is saying a word to a student and having them sound out the word and tell you how many sounds make up the word then, having them change a sound in the word. For example, having a student sound out the word bat, then asking them what are the sounds that make up the word bat and how many sounds they are, then asking students what sound they can take away and add to make the word cat. If students can demonstrate the skills correctly then we know they are making progress towards mastering phonemic awareness.

Another evidence-based assessment that can be used to assess phonemic awareness is to assess students one on one and have students match words that sound alike, say the sounds of a word in the beginning, middle, and end, have students blend sounds together to make an entire word, have students break apart the sounds of a word, and have students change the sounds of a word in the start, middle, and end, (Phonemic Awareness Assessment | Reading Rockets, n.d.). This assessment can help teachers understand where students need extra help and what students are already mastering.

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A teacher could assess their students by having uppercase letters and lowercase letters typed on a piece of paper, and the teacher can run their finger across the row of letters while the student says what the letter is. Another assessment is having students read off the letters, and if they hesitate or reverse letters such as p and q, then the teacher can work with them on those specific letters since they may need more assistance with deciphering the difference between the two letters. (Informed Literacy, n.d.)

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An engaging activity designed to strengthen students' concept of print by encouraging active participation and print awareness could be a silly story time (Kean, 2023). During a read-aloud, the teacher intentionally makes "mistakes" while reading (e.g., reading from the wrong direction, skipping words, or holding the book the wrong way). The students are encouraged to recognize and correct these errors, reinforcing their understanding of how print works.

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A research-based instructional strategy for phoneme segmentation and blending skills is oral blending and segmenting games. These activities strengthen students' ability to hear, isolate, and manipulate phonemes without relying on print, an essential step toward fluent reading.

Implementation Steps:

1. I Say, You Say Game (Blending Focus)

The teacher says individual phonemes in a word (e.g., /s/ - /u/ - /n/).

Students listen and blend the sounds to say the word " sun ".

This helps develop auditory processing skills necessary for decoding.

2. Robot Talk Game (Segmenting Focus)

The teacher says a word normally (e.g., "bat").

Students "talk like a robot" by breaking the word into separate sounds (/b/ - /a/ - /t/).

This reinforces phoneme awareness and prepares students for spelling.

How It Supports Learning:

Strengthens students’ ability to manipulate sounds orally before applying them to written words.

Helps struggling learners by focusing on auditory skills without the added challenge of print.

Provides an engaging, interactive approach that builds phonological awareness in a fun and meaningful way.

(Reading Rockets - Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: In Practice, n.d.)

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A research-based instructional strategy for teaching phonemic awareness, specifically the phoneme isolation portion, is to conduct single sound discrimination activities (McArdle, 2024). These activities focus on teaching students how to isolate and identify individual sounds, which is a crucial skill for mastering phonemic awareness. For example, a single sound discrimination activity might involve having students clap while sounding out a word like 'bat' and then asking students to identify and say just the starting sound, then the middle sound, and then the ending sound. This activity would be repeated with different words to ensure that students fully understand the concept and that they can identify the different sounds in a word.

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An instructional strategy for how to teach letter naming is by having plastic toy letters that the students can use. The teacher can hold up a letter and say it, and the students can then grab the same letter off of their desks and then say the letter's name as a class. This is beneficial because they can see and hear the teacher say the letter name and then practice looking at the letter and saying the name. This will help because it is a hands-on activity that allows students to connect the written letter to the spoken letter.

(Reading Rockets The Alphabetical Principle, n.d.)

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To support English learners during this activity, teachers can use visual cues like pointing to the text or highlighting words to help students recognize mistakes. Additionally, sentence frames (e.g., "That's wrong because we read from ____ to _____.") can provide structured ways for English learners to participate confidently. For students with dyslexia, using books with large print and extra spacing can make tracking words easier.

(Voyager Sopris Learning, 2023)

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A highly effective multisensory differentiation strategy for teaching letter-sound correspondence, particularly beneficial for English learners (ELs) and students with dyslexia, is tactile letter tracing. This approach engages multiple senses—visual, auditory, and tactile—to reinforce the connection between letters and their corresponding sounds.

Implementation Steps:

1. Material Preparation: Provide students with textured surfaces such as sandpaper letters or trays filled with sand or rice.

2. Demonstration: Show students how to trace a letter on the textured surface using their finger while simultaneously articulating the letter's sound.

3. Guided Practice: Have students practice tracing each letter while saying its corresponding sound aloud, ensuring they engage their sense of touch, sight, and hearing simultaneously.

Benefits:

Enhanced Memory Retention: Engaging multiple senses helps solidify the association between letters and sounds, improving recall.

Support for ELs: This method aids in pronunciation and reinforces phonemic awareness, which is crucial for language acquisition.

Assistance for Students with Dyslexia: The tactile element provides an additional pathway for learning, accommodating diverse learning needs.

(Spear-Swerling, 2023)

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A multi-sensory strategy to teach phonemic awareness and support all young learners, especially English language learners and students with dyslexia, is to use hand gestures while identifying sounds in words. For example, students can tap their shoulder when saying the first sound of a word and tap down their arm as they say each next sound. Once they’ve said all the sounds in the word, they can swipe their hand across their arm to show how the sounds come together to form a word. This helps students by engaging their senses as it provides a kinesthetic way to track and isolate sounds. For example, students can use this strategy if they are having a hard time identifying the first, middle, or last sound of a word. This helps English language learners and students with dyslexia because it gives them a physical way to identify phonemes, and it helps them break down the sounds of a word step-by-step. Additionally, this method helps students keep track of the sounds they are saying, which comes in handy when learning phonemic isolation, blending, segmentation, and manipulation (Phonemic Awareness Hand Motions for the Reading Horizons Discovery, n.d.).

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A multisensory differentiation strategy for letter naming is using a gel board that the students can practice writing the letters in. This can be a beneficial tool for English learners and students with dyslexia because they can feel the difference when they write letters such as b or d that are often mixed up. Gel boards are a helpful tool because it is a hands-on activity that is different than simply writing the letters on a piece of paper, which can help provide a new way to see how to tell the difference between letters that are frequently mixed up.

(Informed Literacy, n.d.)