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Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words, which is a vital skill for learning to read and spell. 

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Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words, which is a vital skill for learning to read and spell. 

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Online Support to Assist Families at Home 

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Online Support to Assist Families at Home 

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Readability provides great information, strategies, and resources to support children at home to develop strong reading comprehension skills, which are vital for a child's education and future.

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Developing strong reading comprehension skills is crucial to your child's future success. But many children struggle to master these important skills in the classroom. The good news is that there are plenty of ways for parents to help their children improve reading skills outside of the classroom. Here's how parents can help with reading comprehension at home:

Start A Family Book Club

Use Online Reading Comprehension Worksheets

There are a number of websites that allow parents to print reading comprehension worksheets for free. Each worksheet will include a short passage followed by questions about the passage.

Ask your child to complete these worksheets so they can practice their reading comprehension skills at home. The more they practice, the more they will improve their reading comprehension skills.

Create Graphic Organizers

If your child is a visual learner, creating a graphic organizer is a great way to improve their reading comprehension skills .

There are several ways to use graphic organizers to improve your child's reading comprehension skills. For example, create Venn diagrams to compare and contrast characters in a story. Or create a storyboard that shows the sequence of events that took place in the story.

Creating these graphic organizers can help your child understand the relationship between characters and events, the chronological order of events, and other concepts.

Play Audio Books

Some children are auditory learners, so they may benefit from listening to audio books . Instruct your child to follow along with the narrator while you play an audio book. Auditory learners may be able to extract more meaning from the text by listening and following along as opposed to reading independently.

Encourage All Types of Reading

Practice is the key to improving reading comprehension , so encourage your children to practice as much as possible. Don't limit your children to books, either. Encourage them to read anything they may find interesting, which may include comic books, newspapers, and magazines.

Focus On Your Child's Favorite Topics

Studies show that reading multiple books on the same topic can actually help your child improve their reading comprehension skills more than reading multiple books on various topics.

Use this research to your advantage by finding books related to your child's favorite topics. Does your child love baseball? If so, check out a handful of different baseball-themed books from the local library. Is your child interested in the solar system? Find five or six books on the planets.

Discuss the books with your child once you're done reading. Ask your child to compare and contrast the books to check their comprehension and keep them engaged.

Compare Books and Movies

Download the Readability App

Let your child work on their reading comprehension skills anytime, anywhere with the Readability app, which is available for Apple and Android devices.

Readability's Interactive Voice-Based Questions & Answers (IVQA) feature allows your child to communicate with the app just like they would with a reading tutor. The app will ask your child questions about the text and listen to their answers to keep them engaged and improve their reading comprehension skills.

You can even keep a close eye on your child's progress using the parent dashboard, which will . Use the dashboard to watch as your child drastically track your child's pronunciation accuracy, comprehension, and time spent reading improves their reading comprehension skills over time using this innovative app.

Download the app on your smartphone or tablet to start your free 7-day trial today.

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How Parents Can Help With Reading Comprehension At Home

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Learn how parents can help with reading comprehension at home so you can improve your child's crucial reading skills.

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Blending: Combining individual sounds to form words (e.g., /h/ /a/ /t/ = hat)

Segmenting: breaking words into individual sounds (e.g., cat= /c/ /a/ /t/)

Manipulating: can add, delete, or substitute sounds within words (e.g., changing "hat" to "cat" by substituting the /h/ sound for /c/)

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Phonemic Awareness

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Phonemic Awareness

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1. Sound Scavenger Hunt:

Choose a letter and have students find objects around the classroom or school that begins with that sound. This is activity is hands-on and engaging, allowing students to actively listen for and identify sounds in spoken words.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing visual supports, using simplified language with clear instruction repeated as needed, modify the task by letting some students identify less objects, while some may look for more, allowing students to touch or manipulate the object they find to support sensory integration for learning enhancement, and provide assistive technology like speech-to-text or visual timers.

2. Rhyming Games:

Practicing rhyming as a whole group in an interactive setting by identifying rhyming words or having students create their own rhyming pairs. Rhyming is a foundational skill in phonemic awareness and it helps students to understand the sound structure of words.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing explicit instruction which means the teacher show students how to identify rhyming words by pointing out the similar sounds at the end of words, providing visual aids such as pictures or graphic organizers, scaffolding by using simple rhyming words first then gradually increase the complexity when understanding is shown, and use movement, gestures, or manipulatives to reinforce the rhyming sounds.

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Phonics is a method of teaching reading and spelling that focuses on the relationship between sounds and letters to help students decode words. 



Phonics is an important foundation for reading and spelling skills and helps students become proficient readers and writers. 

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Phonics is a method of teaching reading and spelling that focuses on the relationship between sounds and letters to help students decode words. 



Phonics is an important foundation for reading and spelling skills and helps students become proficient readers and writers. 

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To support your early learner to learn phonemic awareness at home, you can play "I Spy" with sounds by focusing on the initial sounds of the object such as "I spy something that starts with /s/" and continue with a new sound supporting your young learner with encouragement and positive feedback.

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Online Support to Assist Families at Home

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Online Support to Assist Families at Home

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Reading Rockets offers a variety of information, including videos, articles, and parenting guides on phonemic awareness and other early literacy skills.

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That's a complicated sounding term, but it's meaning is simple: the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the sounds in spoken language. Phonological awareness is really a group of skills that include a child's ability to:

Identify words that rhyme

Count the number of syllables in a name

Recognize alliteration (words with the same beginning sound)

Segment (break) a sentence into words

Identify the syllables in a word

The most sophisticated phonological awareness skill (and the last to develop) is called phonemic awareness - the ability to hear, recognize, and play with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. When playing with the sounds in word, children learn to:

Blend individual sounds to make a word

Stretch out a word into its individual sounds

Swap in a different sound to the beginning, middle, or end of a word to make a new word

Strong phonemic awareness is one of the strongest predictors of later reading success. Children who struggle with reading, including kids with dyslexia, often have trouble with phonemic awareness, but with the right kind of instruction they can be successful. Learn some of the warning signs for dyslexia in this article, Clues to Dyslexia in Early Childhood.

Parents can make a big difference in helping their children become readers by practicing these pre-reading oral skills at home. Try some of the simple rhyming and word sound games described here.

Try these speech sound activities at home

Rhyme time

"I am thinking of an animal that rhymes with big. What's the animal?" Answer: pig. What else rhymes with big? ( dig, fig, wig)

Road trip rhymes

While you're out driving in the car, spot something out the window and ask your child, "what rhymes with tree or car or shop?" Then switch roles and have your child spot something and ask you for a rhyme. This can turn into a game of nonsense rhymes ("What rhymes with tree stump?") but that's great for practicing sounds, too!

Word families

Word families are sets of words that rhyme. Start to build your family by giving your child the first word, for example, cat. Then ask your child to name all the "kids" in the cat family, such as: bat, fat, sat, rat, pat, mat, hat, flat. This will help your child hear patterns in words.

Silly tongue twisters

Sing songs and say silly tongue twisters. These help your child become sensitive to the sounds in words.

Tongue ticklers

Alliteration or "tongue ticklers" - where the sound you're focusing on is repeated over and over again - can be a fun way to provide practice with a speech sound. Try these:

For M: Miss Mouse makes marvelous meatballs!

For S: Silly Sally sings songs about snakes and snails.

For F: Freddy finds fireflies with a flashlight.

Syllable shopping

While at the grocery store, have your child tell you the syllables in different food names. Have them hold up a finger for each word part. Eggplant = egg-plant, two syllables. Pineapple = pine-ap-ple, three syllables. Show your child the sign for each and ask her to say the word.

"I spy" first sounds

Practice beginning sounds with this simple "I spy" game at home, on a walk, or at the grocery store. Choose words with distinctive, easy-to-hear beginning sounds. For example, if you're in the bathroom you can say, "I spy something red that starts with the "s" ssss sound ( soap)."

Sound scavenger hunt

Choose a letter sound, then have your child find things around your house that start with the same sound. "Can you find something in our house that starts with the letter "p" pppppp sound? Picture, pencil, pear "

Which letter sounds do I teach first?

Reading expert Linda Farrell recommends that you begin with teaching the letter names, and then focus on the letter sounds that are closest to their letter names (such as /v/). And here's a great tip for teaching the trickier letter name-letter sound combinations - use arm motions. In this video, Linda demonstrates motions for /x/ and /y/. (From our video series Reading SOS: Expert Answers to Family Questions About Reading.)

Sound games

Practice blending sounds into words. Ask "Can you guess what this word is? m - o - p." Hold each sound longer than normal.

First sounds

When you're reading together with your child, pick a word from the book and say it with emphasis on the first sound. Pick another word and compare them. "Zzz-zookeeper and rrr-rhinoceros. Can you hear what sound zzz-zookeeper starts with? Is it the same as rrr-rhinoceros?

Jump, skip, hop!

Create simple picture cards that you draw or cut out of magazines. Have your child, identify what's in the picture, and then break that word into its individual sounds. For example dog is d-o-g, three sounds (phonemes). Three sounds? You and your child do three jumping jacks, skips, or hops (followed by a high-five). You can also do this game outdoors without the cards, just call out simple words for your child.

Snail talk

Tell your child you're going to communicate in "snail talk" and they need to figure out what you're saying. Take a simple word and stretch it out very slowly (e.g., /fffffllllaaaag/), then ask your child to tell you the word. Switch roles and have your child stretch out a word for you.

"I spy" blending

Here's an easy phoneme blending game you can play while talking a walk. For blending, you can say, "I see a sign that says s-t-o-p" Then your child has to blend the sounds to guess your word - stop. (Remember to say only the sounds in the word - not the letters.) Keep the words short, moving from two to three to four sounds depending on your child's skill level.

Sound counting

Using LEGO bricks, beads, or pennies, say a word and have your child show you how many sounds the word makes. For example, top = t-o-p = three sounds, so your child would place three objects in a row. Then have them tap each object as they say the sound. Remember, your child is just showing you the sounds they hear. So the word bike would be = b-i-k (silent e) = only three sounds.

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Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Activities for Your Kindergartener

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Phonological and phonemic awareness are important pre-reading skills, related to the ability to hear, identify, and play with the sounds in spoken language - including rhymes, syllables, and the smallest units of sound (phonemes). Children with strong phonological awareness skills are ready to become readers.

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Phonics in Early Learning

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Phonics in Early Learning

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1. Letter Puzzles:

Have students match each picture object to it's corresponding letter. This will help students learn letter and sound recognition. Flashcards can also be used to have students match them to their corresponding sounds or words. This activity can be done in small group, whole group, or independent practice.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing explicit instruction showing students examples of matching each object to the corresponding letter, providing visual aids on the smart board so students can use it as reference of correct practice after teacher's explicit instruction, modifying the task for individual learning needs, and provide enough time for all learners to attempt the activity, offering feedback and positive praise through effort and ability.

2. Hands-on:

Have students trace letters in sand or mold the letter with playdough while saying the corresponding sound.

These activities can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing explicit instruction which means the teacher models how to do the letter tracing in the sand or how to mold the letter with playdough using the document camera for best display quality for all students to see, provide visual support by leaving the examples during explicit instruction up on the board for students to use as reference and practice, modify task for sensory needs, simplifying or taking away if overwhelming and have an accommodation ready if needed, provide enough time for all learners to attempt and practice activity, as well as providing feedback and support during activity.

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To teach phonics at home you must focus on building phonemic awareness (sound recognition) to your child.

One home strategy that is fun and engaging, is to hide letters around the house and have your child find them and say the sound to you. Provide positive praise or kind corrective feedback if needed to keep your child feeling proud and engaged in the home activity.

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Online Support to Assist Families at Home

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Online Support to Assist Families at Home

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Brightwheel provides endless ideas and inspiration to help you support your early learners with fun, engaging phonics activities.

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Learn how these phonics activities help ignite enthusiasm, spark creativity, and enhance word recognition in preschoolers—all while boosting their confidence in literacy skills.

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Vocabulary encompasses the collection of words, phrases, and expression that a child knows and can use or comprehend. 

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Vocabulary encompasses the collection of words, phrases, and expression that a child knows and can use or comprehend. 

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Types of Vocabulary:

Reading: words a child needs to understand when reading.

Listening: words a child needs to understand when listening to others speak.

Speaking: words a child uses when talking.

Writing: words a child uses when writing.

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Vocabulary in Early Learning

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Vocabulary in Early Learning

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1. Word of the Day:

Each day, the teacher can introduce a new word that is age-appropriate for learning levels and have students use it in a sentence or draw a picture that is represents it. This can be done in a whole group, small group, or in an independent practice.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing visual aids to represent the vocabulary word, provide words walls with pictures, and allow students to demonstrate their understanding in different ways.

2. Story Time:

The teacher can introduce new words within a story and discuss their meaning during and after, supporting real-life connection, recall, retelling, and repeating to support students retaining the vocabulary understanding.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing the story on a document camera displayed largely for best viewing and visual support, using simplified language and age appropriate description of the word, read aloud with expression using different voices and pacing to support engagement, and if needed pre-teach the vocabulary so students can pick up on it and build background knowledge.

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Read with your child at home each day or at bedtime!

This practice exposes your child to vivid and endless language and new words. Take the time to define the new word in a kid-friendly way and support visual connections by pointing at the picture or word while discussing with your child the meaning. Focus on positive feedback, joy for reading, and give them choice on stories and their interests.

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Online Support to Assist Families At Home

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Online Support to Assist Families At Home

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Edutopia is a wonderful resource for families and educators to utilize to help build vocabulary knowledge and provide ideas, activities, and supportive practices to help every early learner.

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Early elementary teachers can use these fun activities to help make vocabulary lessons accessible for all of their students.

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Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, at a good pace, and with proper expression and comprehension. 



Fluency bridges the gap between decoding words and understanding the meaning of the text. 

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Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, at a good pace, and with proper expression and comprehension. 



Fluency bridges the gap between decoding words and understanding the meaning of the text. 

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Fluency in Early Learning

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Fluency in Early Learning

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1. Choral Reading:

Guided by the teacher, students read a passage aloud together while focusing on reading with expression and maintaining a consistent pace.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing visual aids such as graphic organizers or pictures associated with the text, provide pre-teaching and explicit instruction by introducing key vocabulary and concepts before the reading practice to support comprehension of the text, provide simplified versions of the text in small group form to support lower reading level students who need extra support.

2. Echo Reading:

The teacher can read a passage or sentence aloud with expression and then have the students repeat the same passage or sentence, wanting them to imitate the teacher's pace and intonation.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing modeling of multiple examples of fluent reading before students practice echoing the text, providing visual supports such as highlighting key words and finger-pointing cues to support guided reading, provide individualized instruction and feedback to students struggling, and offer a different reading levels of the same text to meet individual learning needs.

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Make reading fun! Encourage your child to record their reading progress and reflect on all the reading they have done in a positive way.

Reading Log Ideas:

A large poster where they record the book information and/or color in part of a picture for each book they read until the whole picture is complete with the total of books at the end.

Reading long paper chain where each chain represents a book finished.

Book sticker chart

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Online Supports to Assist Families at Home

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Online Supports to Assist Families at Home

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Reading Rockets provides endless strategies for developing reading fluency at home. This resource provides free, research-based information on how young children learn to read and how to help them.

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Guidelines for instruction

Provide children with opportunities to read and reread a range of stories and informational texts by reading on their own, partner reading, or choral reading.

Introduce new or difficult words to children, and provide practice reading these words before they read on their own.

Include opportunities for children to hear a range of texts read fluently and with expression.

Suggest ideas for building home-school connections that encourage families to become involved actively in children's reading development.

Encourage periodic timing of children's oral reading and recording of information about individual children's reading rate and accuracy.

Model fluent reading, then have students reread the text on their own.

What students should read

Fluency develops as a result of many opportunities to practice reading with a high degree of success. Therefore, your students should practice rereading aloud texts that are reasonably easy for them – that is, texts containing mostly words that they know or can decode easily. In other words, the texts should be at the students' independent reading level.

A text is at students' independent reading level if they can read it with about 95% accuracy. If the text is more difficult, students will focus on word recognition and will not have an opportunity to develop fluency.

The text your students practice rereading orally should also be relatively short – probably 50-200 words, depending on the age of the students. You should also use a variety of reading materials, including stories, nonfiction, and poetry. Poetry is especially well suited to fluency practice because poems for children are often short and they contain rhythm, rhyme, and meaning, making practice easy, fun, and rewarding.

Model fluent reading

By listening to good models of fluent reading, students learn how a reader's voice can help written text make sense. Read aloud daily to your students. By reading effortlessly and with expression, you are modeling for your students how a fluent reader sounds during reading.

Repeated reading

After you model how to read the text, you must have the students reread it. By doing this, the students are engaging in repeated reading. Usually, having students read a text four times is sufficient to improve fluency. Remember, however, that instructional time is limited, and it is the actual time that students are actively engaged in reading that produces reading gains.

Have other adults read aloud to students. Encourage parents or other family members to read aloud to their children at home. The more models of fluent reading the children hear, the better. Of course, hearing a model of fluent reading is not the only benefit of reading aloud to children. Reading to children also increases their knowledge of the world, their vocabulary, their familiarity with written language ("book language"), and their interest in reading.

Activities for students to increase fluency

There are several ways that your students can practice orally rereading text, including student-adult reading, choral (or unison) reading, tape-assisted reading, partner reading, and readers' theatre.

Student-adult reading

In student-adult reading, the student reads one-on-one with an adult. The adult can be you, a parent, a classroom aide, or a tutor. The adult reads the text first, providing the students with a model of fluent reading. Then the student reads the same passage to the adult with the adult providing assistance and encouragement. The student rereads the passage until the reading is quite fluent. This should take approximately three to four rereadings.

Choral reading

In choral, or unison, reading, students read along as a group with you (or another fluent adult reader). Of course, to do so, students must be able to see the same text that you are reading. They might follow along as you read from a big book, or they might read from their own copy of the book you are reading. For choral reading, choose a book that is not too long and that you think is at the independent reading level of most students. Patterned or predictable books are particularly useful for choral reading, because their repetitious style invites students to join in. Begin by reading the book aloud as you model fluent reading.

Then reread the book and invite students to join in as they recognize the words you are reading. Continue rereading the book, encouraging students to read along as they are able. Students should read the book with you three to five times total (though not necessarily on the same day). At this time, students should be able to read the text independently.

Tape-assisted reading

In tape-assisted reading, students read along in their books as they hear a fluent reader read the book on an audiotape. For tape-assisted reading, you need a book at a student's independent reading level and a tape recording of the book read by a fluent reader at about 80-100 words per minute. The tape should not have sound effects or music. For the first reading, the student should follow along with the tape, pointing to each word in her or his book as the reader reads it. Next, the student should try to read aloud along with the tape. Reading along with the tape should continue until the student is able to read the book independently, without the support of the tape.

Partner reading

In partner reading, paired students take turns reading aloud to each other. For partner reading, more fluent readers can be paired with less fluent readers. The stronger reader reads a paragraph or page first, providing a model of fluent reading. Then the less fluent reader reads the same text aloud. The stronger student gives help with word recognition and provides feedback and encouragement to the less fluent partner. The less fluent partner rereads the passage until he or she can read it independently. Partner reading need not be done with a more and less fluent reader. In another form of partner reading, children who read at the same level are paired to reread a story that they have received instruction on during a teacher-guided part of the lesson. Two readers of equal ability can practice rereading after hearing the teacher read the passage.

Readers' theatre

In readers' theatre, students rehearse and perform a play for peers or others. They read from scripts that have been derived from books that are rich in dialogue. Students play characters who speak lines or a narrator who shares necessary background information. Readers' theatre provides readers with a legitimate reason to reread text and to practice fluency. Readers' theatre also promotes cooperative interaction with peers and makes the reading task appealing.

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Fluency: Instructional Guidelines and Student Activities

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The best strategy for developing reading fluency is to provide your students with many opportunities to read the same passage orally several times. To do this, you should first know what to have your students read. Second, you should know how to have your students read aloud repeatedly.

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In early reading, comprehension is the ability to understand and make meaning from what is read, inclusive in the ability to decode words, connect text to prior knowledge, and able to engage in deeper meaning and thinking about the material read or being read. 

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In early reading, comprehension is the ability to understand and make meaning from what is read, inclusive in the ability to decode words, connect text to prior knowledge, and able to engage in deeper meaning and thinking about the material read or being read. 

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Comprehension in Early Learning

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Two Classroom Activities to Foster Comprehension in Early Learning

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1. Think-Pair-Share

Teacher has students engage in a structured discussion from a text that they've read, where they first need to think about the question to themselves, then discuss it with a partner, and finally share their ideas with the whole class. This activity supports and promotes critical thinking, active listening, and collaborative learning of a text and key themes.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by using visual aides and simplified language for ELs and struggling learners to facilitate participation, provide focused and short questions with clear expectations and often repeat to enforce the expectation and guidance, allow students to choose how they are able to participate either with written, drawn, or verbal responses, and lastly you can provide graphic organizers or sentence framing to help students to structure and outline their thoughts.

2. Storytelling with Visuals

The teacher has students engage in a creative activity to demonstrate their understanding of a story by creating a visual representation. This could be a comic strip, storyboard, or a drawing, and then they share their work with the class. This activity supports student expression of their understanding while catering to various abilities and learning styles.

This activity can be differentiated for students with exceptionalities by providing graphic organizers to help structure their ideas, use simplified language and visual cues to facilitate participation, provide sentence starters or pre-selected vocabulary words to help students be able to express their ideas, and encourage exploring more complex themes for students who are advanced.

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Read aloud together and discuss the story. Reading together with your child aloud helps them to hear the flow of language and by stopping to periodically discuss and ask questions about the text like characters, settings, predictions, supports positive engagement and practice of understanding and deeper level thinking of reading.