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Phonemic Awareness SGI Lesson - 1st Grade

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Phonemic Awareness Lesson | For Teachers: Lesson Ideas, Class Activities | Preschool & Kindergarten

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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!

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5 Quick, Easy, and Fun Phonemic Awareness Activities

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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.

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Teach phonemic awareness with this exciting set of educational games and activities. Topics include rhyming, alliteration, contrasting sounds and sound talk. Perfect for PreK. This value pack contains 2 board games, 1 megaphone, 20 sound cards and 32 rhyming cards. Each game has self-correcting elements. Contains game guide with instructions. Ages 3+.

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Teach phonemic awareness with this exciting set of educational games and activities. Topics include rhyming, alliteration, contrasting sounds and sound talk. Perfect for PreK. This value pack contains 2 board games, 1 megaphone, 20 sound cards and 32 rhyming cards. Each game has self-correcting elements. Contains game guide with instructions.

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alphabet and phonemic awareness linking cubes for early reading (set of 82)

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hand2mind Reading Rods, Alphabet and Phonemic Awareness Linking Cubes for Early Reading (Set of 82)

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Helps students reinforce, practice, and Master key literacy skills! get started with reading Rods with this letter and picture set to build Alphabet and phonemic awareness. The color-coding of the Rods provides quick visual cues: red Vowel letters match with pink initial Vowel pictures; Blue cons...

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Starfall: Learn to Read with Phonics, Learn Mathematics

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The Starfall Website is a program service of Starfall Education Foundation, a publicly supported nonprofit organization, 501(c)(3). The website opened in September of 2002 as a free public service and social enterprise supported by the Polis-Schutz family. On July 1, 2015, the Polis-Schutz family donated their full interest in Starfall to the Starfall Education Foundation.

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Basics: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

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Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of individual speech sounds, or phonemes. A child's skill in phonological and phonemic awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty.

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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech. There are approximately 41 phonemes in the English language, according to a report from the National Reading Panel. Other estimates vary between 36 and 44 phonemes, Connie Juel writes in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Volume 2.

Syllables and words are a combination of phonemes. Some words have only one phoneme, such as a or oh. But most words blend several phonemes, such as go with two phonemes, or check with three phonemes, or stop with four phonemes, according to the National Reading Panel.

Phonemic awareness (PA) reflects a deep understanding of these units of sound. PA and letter knowledge are the two strongest school-entry predictors of how well students will learn to read in their first two years of school. Educators can implement phonemic awareness strategies to benefit children with reading skills.

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes in spoken words, according to the National Reading Panel.

Phonemic awareness represents a high level of phonological awareness, or understanding different ways oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Phonological awareness may begin with a child recognizing language sounds in rhyming songs and progress to recognizing how sentences can be broken down into individual words.

Finally, the child may be able to approach individual words. This involves syllables, onset (the initial consonant or consonant cluster), rime (the vowel and consonants that follow the onset), and individual phonemes. The following examples of the term "protect" provide an illustration.

Syllable: /pro/ and /tEkt/

Onset and Rime Within the Syllable: /pr/ and /o/, and /t/ and /Ekt/, respectively

Individual Phonemes: /p/, /r/, /o/, /t/, /E/, /k/, and /t/

"The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning," the National Research Council says in Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. "When that insight includes an understanding that words can be divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness."

Assessing phonemic awareness typically involves tasks such as isolating or segmenting one or more phonemes of a spoken word, blending or combining a sequence of separate phonemes into a word, or manipulating the phonemes within a word, such as by adding or subtracting. For instance, a teacher may have students replace the /c/ in "cat" to /p/ to create a new word ("pat").

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Effectiveness of Phonemic Awareness Strategies and Training

The National Reading Panel analyzed 96 cases comparing treatment groups that received phonemic awareness education to control groups that received either an alternative form of instruction or no special instruction. Three main outcome variables were examined: phonemic awareness, reading, and spelling.

Training was found to be very effective in teaching phonemic awareness to students. The effect was strong immediately after training and remained so long-term. Phonemic awareness training also improved children's ability to read and spell in the short and long term, and this effect was moderate.

"Findings of the meta-analyses show that PA training benefits the processes involved in reading real words, pseudowords, and text reading," the National Reading Panel says. "It also benefits spelling skills in normally progressing readers below 2nd grade and in beginners at risk for developing reading problems."

Phonemic Awareness Strategies

Primary Tasks

The National Reading Panel identified common tasks used to assess or improve children's phonemic awareness. These methods include:

Isolation: This means recognizing individual sounds in words. For example, the first sound in "paste" (/p/).

Identity: This is recognizing the common sound in different words. For example, the sound that is the same in "bike," "boy" and "bell" (/b/).

Categorization: This is when the child is asked to find the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words. For example, "rug" is the word that does not belong in "bus, bun and rug."

Blending: By listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds, the child learns to combine them to form a recognizable word. For example, the word created with the sounds "/s/ /k/ /u/ /l/" is "school."

Segmentation: Students may tap out or count the sounds of a word, or pronounce and position a marker for each sound. For example, counting the number of phonemes in "ship" (three: /š/ /I/ /p/).

Deletion: When a phoneme is removed, the child learns to recognize the word that remains. For example, the word created when /s/ from "smile" is eliminated ("mile").

Activities and Games

Activities and games are a great way to help educators teach phonemic awareness. The following examples are from the journal Intervention in School and Clinic, in an excerpt reprinted by Reading Rockets.

Simple Phonemic Awareness

Isolated Sound Recognition: Instructors can associate phonemes with a creature, an action or an object familiar to the child. For instance, associating the phoneme /s/ with the hissing sound of a snake and calling it a "Sammy snake" sound. Others include the crowing rooster for /r/, a buzzing bee for /z/ and the "be quiet" sound for /sh/. These sound personalities create a natural connection for children.

Word, Syllable and Phoneme Counting: Instructors can read sentences to children without the sentence being visible. The children place a marker from left to right for each word heard, and the teacher can confirm the amount of words by showing the printed sentence and pointing to each word as it is read. Clapping hands, tapping the desk or marching in place can help children count syllables or sounds in words.

Sound-to-Word Matching: Instructors can show children a picture of a dog, and ask children to identify the correct word out of three options ("Is there an /mmm/-og, a /d/d/d/-og or an /sss/-og?"). A variation is to ask if the word has a particular sound ("Is there a /d/ in dog?").

Compound Phonemic Awareness

Word-to-Word Matching: Instructors can use games to help children practice determining whether two words begin with the same sound. Dominoes, card games and even a bingo game using similar sounds can all be effective. One game is to make a set of dominoes with two pictured objects on each side and have children join cards sharing beginning sounds. Another is a version of the card game "snap," where children take turns drawing a card from a face-down pile and placing it in a face-up pile. When a card has the same beginning sound as the top card in the face-up pile, the first child to say "snap" collects the pile. Or, children can play sound bingo using cards with pictures. Children mark when one of the pictures has the same beginning sound as the word said by the caller.

Sound Deletion: Instructors can show pictures or point to objects in the room that are compound words, and demonstrate how each word can be said with a part missing. For instance, by saying "seesaw" without the "saw," or saying "hotdog" without the "dog." This can be done in the form of a "Simon says" game: "Simon says, 'say bookmark without the book.'"

Building Skills in Reading

Phonemic awareness strategies help young children build a foundation for reading and spelling. When students are ready to read, reading activities for kids can further develop these abilities and encourage a passion for reading.

Southeastern University offers online education degrees that help teachers inspire and lead students. Programs such as the Master of Education in Reading Education and the Master of Education in Elementary Education focus on literacy skills. They take place in a flexible and convenient online learning environment.

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Phonemic Awareness Strategies for Building Literacy Skills

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A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in speech. There are approximately 41 phonemes in the English language, according to a report from the National Reading Panel. Other estimates vary between 36 and 44 phonemes, Connie Juel writes in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Volume 2.

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Good reading instruction begins with laying a solid foundation on which to build, and for reading that foundation is phonemic awareness.

The definition of phonemic awareness (PA) is the understanding that the individual speech sounds of English, known as phonemes, have unique differences and blend together to form words. The understanding that phonemes exist is a key element in the ability to later connect those sounds to the letters or groups of letters that represent them in print.

The ability to produce and understand spoken language is innate, meaning that children will naturally acquire oral language skills in the languages that are spoken and reinforced with them. Because spoken English is composed of words that are connected to provide meaning ("want cookie"), the awareness that words are actually groups of individual sounds is not readily apparent in speech.

For many children, phonemic awareness occurs without explicit phonics instruction through games, songs, and making connections while reading with an adult. These children will begin by developing an abstract understanding that phonemes exist inside of words, but a significant percentage of children will remain unaware that individual sounds comprise the words they use every day. These children will need explicit instruction to develop this awareness. The good news is that children who receive effective instruction can develop a solid foundation on which to build reading and spelling skills.

Phonemic awareness typically includes basic knowledge of initial, medial (middle), and final sounds, and rhyming, blending, and segmentation. Adams (1990) outlined five levels of phonemic awareness:

Basic ability to hear the sounds of words as measured by nursery rhymes

Ability to compare and contrast the sounds of words for rhyme or alliteration

Comfortable familiarity with the idea that words can be split into small sounds and awareness of blending and syllable-splitting

Thorough understanding that words can be analyzed into a series of phonemes

Ability to add, delete, or move any phoneme and generate a word or nonword as a result

Because phonemic awareness does not involve print, assessments and instruction utilize individual sounds, groups of sounds, and words. Some examples that move from simple to complex are included in the following activities.

How important is phonemic awareness?

Adams and other researchers have stated that the single strongest determinant of a child's future reading success is the degree of PA that a child possesses prior to entering school. This conclusion highlights the importance of assessing awareness when children first enter kindergarten and providing structured support for children who have not yet developed awareness of speech sounds.

Although the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has determined that phonemic awareness should be acquired by first grade, many children do not have access to high-quality PA instruction in the early grades. Children with auditory processing difficulties or learning disabilities are particularly vulnerable and may need extended instructional opportunities in order to identify and distinguish between sounds.

Because phonemic awareness has been shown to be an essential skill for reading, it's value is not limited to young children. Older students, too, often lack foundational knowledge of consonant and vowel sounds and struggle to make sense of simple decoding patterns. As stated by Torgeson (2005), these older students need phonics-based programs that build PA instead of assuming they already have it. If PA is not fully developed, middle and high school students may have difficulty when they encounter unfamiliar words.

PA instruction is also particularly important for English Language Learners (ELLs). Each language has unique speech sounds that may be difficult to transfer to English and the need for explicit PA instruction with this population is supported by research. A 2005 study by Genesee and others concluded that "ELLs with well-developed phonological awareness skills in English acquire initial reading skills more easily than ELLs with poorly developed phonological awareness skills in English." The results of a 2010 classroom study, Older Children Need Phonemic Awareness Instruction, Too (2010)

What are the recommended strategies for teaching phonemic awareness?

The first step in improving PA is to review the sounds of individual phonemes to ensure that students are able to hear, produce, identify, and manipulate phonemes.

Regardless of age, nothing should be presumed about a student's prior knowledge-instruction must start at the very beginning to confirm that there are no gaps in understanding. Teachers can then provide age-appropriate instruction on phonemes through interactive, multisensory activities.

Next, an effective strategy is to join phonemes together to form bigrams-letter combinations containing a beginning consonant and a vowel. Bigrams are important for teaching students to blend from one sound to the next without inserting pauses or extra sounds between spoken phonemes.

Developing the process of "sliding" from one sound to the next proves valuable when students move to adding blends (trigrams) and an ending consonant to form words. Additionally, this skill improves a student's ability to eventually connect phonemes to the letters represented by these sounds.

The Reading Horizons method includes this essential component through the use of the Slide. Slides are the beginning sounds that occur by moving from left to right when bigrams or trigrams are combined. Slides encourage blending sounds as a preliminary step to building words and as a support for fluency.

Students then add ending sounds to build real words and practice identifying and manipulating the individual phonemes in words.

Phonemic awareness is a foundational skill for reading readiness. With PA solidly in place, students are ready to begin connecting sound to print.

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Good reading instruction begins with laying a solid foundation on which to build, and for reading that foundation is phonemic awareness. The definition of phonemic awareness (PA) is the understanding that the individual speech sounds of English, known as phonemes, have unique differences and blend together to form words.

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Phonemic awareness is an important skill to teach kids who are getting ready to learn to read or who are struggling to get the hang of basic reading. Phonemic awareness is an understanding of phonemes and how they work together to create words.

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that can be differentiated in a word. For instance in the word "cat," the phonemes are the "c" sound, the "short a" sound, and the "t" sound. A child who possesses phonemic awareness can segment sounds in words (for example, pronounce just the first sound heard in the word cat) and blend strings of isolated sounds together to form recognizable word forms.
Side Note: I am aware that phonemic awareness is not the only approach to teach reading or the best approach for every child. Some children never develop an understanding of how letters make certain sounds or how those sounds blend together to make whole words. Some children who read, learn through memorization of word shape, order of letters, etc. However, research indicates that early teaching of phonemic awareness before actual reading is introduced, and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness for children who are struggling to get the basics, is highly beneficial and can actually prevent reading problems down the road. If phonemic awareness training is not working, we naturally try other approaches.
What is the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics?
Phonemic awareness is an understanding about spoken language. Children who are phonemically aware can hear the word (b - a - t) said in three separate sounds and tell you it is bat. They can tell you all the sounds in the spoken word dog. They can tell you that, if you take the last sound off cart, you would have car.

Phonics, on the other hand, is knowing the relation between specific, printed letters (including combinations of letters) and specific, spoken sounds. You are asking children to show their phonics knowledge when you ask them which letter makes the first sound in bat or dog or the last sound in car or cart.

Recent longitudinal studies on reading have demonstrated that the acquisition of phonemic awareness is highly predictive of success in learning to read, and to decode (i.e., sound out a word, blend it together to figure it out) in particular. 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. To read more about phonemic awareness and how it relates to reading acquisition see Phonemic Awareness and the Teaching of Reading A Position Statement from the Board of Directors of the International Reading Association.

Below are helpful strategies for teaching phonemic awareness.
1-Show printed material to your child and talk about the sounds and structure of the words:
Research suggests that the greatest impact on phonemic awareness is achieved when there is interaction with print, along with paying specific attention to phonemes, sound/word structure. Seeing the words, hearing the sounds, and studying the structure with a coach (parent, teachers, etc.) allows them to make the connection between what they see and hear, a crucial skill for reading. It is also helpful to point to each letter and say each sound.

2 - Play letter games/phoneme substitution games:
Research shows that letter/sound games help develop phonemic awareness. Here are some game ideas:

Take turns thinking of a word. Have the adult and child work together to say each sound in the word. Write down the word (adult or child) and say each sound individually pointing to the letter(s) that make that sound.

Pick a word and take turns switching the first sound in the word to see how it changes the word or switch the last sound to see how it changes the word and sound (e.g., turn cat into bat or pop into pod).

Put letters on index cards (e.g., give your child a, t, and c and ask them to arrange them into cat, and talk about each sound-you can do this with a variety of words-rat, pot, bed, mat, etc.).

Play a rhyming game. Take turns thinking of words that rhyme with cat, dog, big, etc. Look at the words, talk about the structure and what makes them rhyme.

Play the song lyric game by changing a phoneme in a song to see how it changes the meaning of the lyrics. For example, "Pop Goes the Weasel" could be changed to "Hop Goes the Weasel." After changing the lyrics talk about how changing a phoneme gives the song a different meaning.

Related Article: 10 Fun Activities to Teach Your Child Letter Sounds 3 - Use auditory, visual, tactile (touch), and kenisthetic (movement) representations of sounds to teach phonemic awareness:
Many successful training studies include concrete representations of sounds to help children understand how to manipulate sounds in a word (e.g., Ball & Blachman, 1991). For instance, auditory cues are in play when children are asked to clap the number of syllables they hear in a spoken word. (Let's clap the sounds in cat!)

Or you could use visual/tactile cues like blocks or chips to represent each sound in a word (e.g., writing each sound or letter on each chip and seeing how you could manipulate the chips to change the words or letters). How about making letters out of play-doh and using those letters to create words, switch sounds around, etc.).

Kinesthetic cues are used when children jump as they repeat sounds, say a rhyming word, or say each sound in a word. How about using your body to make letters (give me a C, give me an A, give me a T!).

Model for your child how to clap the sounds or syllables in a word, jump while saying letter sounds, or use play-doh or blocks to manipulate or change words around.

4 - Provide Early Writing Activities:
Research also indicates that early writing activities are helpful for developing phonemic awareness. Let your child guess how to spell words. If they are correct, talk about why. If they are incorrect, provide guidance on what letters need to be changed and why.

If they can't write letters yet, have them tell you what letters they think would make up a word, or use play-doh, magnetic letters, blocks or the computer to make words. Show your child how to take your thoughts and put them on paper. Use simple sentences like "I am hungry" or "I love cats!" I also love using dry erase boards for writing practice!

5 - Practice at Home Before School Starts (if you didn't do this it is okay-just start practicing now):
Research shows that children who are frequently exposed to print and phonemic awareness activities at home prior to starting school have higher levels of phonemic awareness. Parents can model phonemic awareness by reading aloud to their children, talking about the spelling, structure, and sounds in a word; showing their child how to write a word while saying the sounds; or leading games that incorporate letter and language play. Give your children opportunities to practice early reading skills by talking, singing, rhyming, and playing guessing games.

We also know that many kids love the IPAD and do well with fun, interactive computerized games! A great app to practice phonemic awareness is Kindergarten Reading,Tracing, and Spelling-Learn to Read First Words School Adventure!
Keep Your Cool
Remember to always stay calm when working with a child or student, even if you think they should be getting something that they are not getting. If you get frustrated with them, they may start to feel anxious, angry, inferior, stupid, etc. which will lead to a less productive learning session. Keep practice sessions short (5 to 10 minutes for younger children or children who get easily frustrated and 10 to 15 minutes for older children or children who can work for longer periods without frustration), unless the child is eager to keep going. For suggestions on ways to encourage children to complete tasks or activities they do not want to do, read 3 Ways to Use Timers to Encourage Homework and Chore Completion and How to Use Schedules to Improve Children's Behavior.
Video Presentation
Do you teach phonemic awareness? What strategies do you like to use?
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Here Are Some of Our Favorite Tools for Teaching Phonemic Awareness

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5 Research-Based Reading Strategies for Teaching Phonemic Awareness: An Early Reading Skill

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Phonemic awareness is an important skill to teach kids who are getting ready to learn to read or who are struggling to get the hang of basic reading. Phonemic awareness is an understanding of phonemes and how they work together to create words. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that can be differentiated in a word.

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Leveled Literacy Intervention Curriculum 

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Leveled Literacy Intervention Curriculum 

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What is Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI) and how is LLI used

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Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI)