I know, I know, there are lots of different terms when you are learning how to help kids learn how to read and spell. Teaching foundational reading skills is pretty complex. So, lets start with what they are exactly!
What is phonological awareness?
Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that is the ability to hear and manipulate units of oral language like sounds, syllables, onset & rime in words. Yep, hear, not see or read. Before kids can be successful readers they need to be able to work with sounds and units of oral language. I’ll go over ideas to build phonological awareness below!
What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds (phonemes). It is also the understanding that syllables and words are made up of a sequence of sounds (phonemes). Again, this is a hearing skill that is often paired with letters and phonics patterns to help kids make connections! See all 44 phonemes here.
So what is the difference between
phonological & phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness focuses on the 44 sounds of our language and is part of phonological awareness. Phonological awareness includes phonemic awareness along with syllables, onsite & rime, and other oral language skills. Both work with sounds and are often paired with phonics and letters when they are being taught.
Ways to build Phonological Awareness
Like you read above, phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness, so we start there before going into ways to build other foundational literacy skills! I will also post my YouTube video here for you to watch
My Word Family SOUNDS LIKE FUN Program
If you are interested in my Sounds Like Fun Phonological Awareness Program that I used in my video, check it out below! It is the perfect no-prep program that covers 30 CVC Word Families over 27 ten-minute lessons. Every lesson is scripted with other resources like a benchmark assessment, word family anchor charts & pictures and more!
WAYS TO BUILD PHONEMIC AWARENESS
There are 44 phonemes (sounds) in the English language and only 26 letters. This might sound confusing, but think of /sh/ and that there are 2 sounds for /th/. We need to help kids identify, blend, segment, isolate & manipulate these sounds. We can use phonics and letters to scaffold, but we also need to practice these skills on their own! We are going to focus on the words shut, cut, cat below.
It’s important that whenever you are teaching new skills that you:
1. Model (show them what is looks like & sounds like completely)
2. Chorally participate (you and the kids are doing it together)
before you let them
3. Individually practice (the kids do it without your help). In a whole group setting, some kids may echo or copy others still. Pay attention to this and give small group or 1-on-1 support as you scaffold their learning.
*Important Research-Based Teaching Practice! If the kid(s) are wrong at any time, then stop and give immediate, kind feedback that directly teaches the skill correctly. It might sound like, “I heard you say /kit/ when I said /c/ /a/ /t/. The sounds /c/ /a/ /t/ make cat.
Activities to IDENTIFY Phonemes
MODEL
I suggest starting with the sounds (phonemes) associated with the letters of the alphabet through song! I have a couple that I use often that I learned from the Letter Factory leapfrog show and one from my student teaching days that I’ll have to muster up the courage to post one day. For now, one of my favorite songs comes from Jack Hartman (He has many) that you can see here!
Eventually you will teach the phonemes for diagraphs like /sh/, /th/ & /ch/ and diptongs like /oo/, /ow/, /oi/.
PRACTICE
I also recommend starting with First Sound isolation activities. One of my favorite things to do is let all the kids get 1 thing from around the room like a stuffed animal, pencil, or book. We bring it to the circle and say what each items is. Then, we say the 1st sound of that word. You can also do this with pictures like pictures of a-z animals. This is technically an isolating phonemes activity, but in my experience, it is one of the more concrete activities that we use to help students understand & identify phonemes.
EXTEND
Build this skill to the goal of corresponding each letter to it’s sound (or sounds) to prepare them for reading! you can do this by singing the letter sounds songs while holding alphabet flash cards! We want all our kids to know that each vowel has 2 sounds and the sound for each consonant! Eventually, print out your own phonics cards so that sounds like /sh/ have an sh card, etc. HERE is a quick reference free page and HERE is the set of cards I use in my own class.
Activities to BLEND Phonemes
MODEL
Tap those fingers! Please, add the kinesthetic movement of tapping fingers and then swiping them together (see video above) when you are working with your kids on blending phonemes!
Start with words that have 2-3 sounds like CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant). Say 1 sound at a time while tapping your finger 1 sound at a time (make sure how you tap is the direction they read) like /c/ /a/ /t/, then swipe your fingers together for /cat/. Same with ship: /sh/ gets 1 tap because it is 1 sound, then /i/ /p/ swipe for /ship/.
PRACTICE
Have students also practice by tapping their fingers!
Add manipulatives by using sound boxes (included in my CVC task card resource below) and non-letter manipulatives (think bingo chips or little square pattern blocks). Point to each manipulate and say the sound, have the child run their finger from left-to-right saying the whole word. Eventually, you can use letter manipulatives, but start with non-letter to really build the skill!.
Add novelty by using toys like a frog hopping /sh/ /u/ /t/ and jumping into the play pond (like a blue piece of paper) saying “shut”.
Have a few balls of playdoh that they can smash. You point to each ball saying, /c/ /u/ /t/ and they smash it together saying, “cut”.
EXTEND
Like I mentioned above, eventually replace the non-letter manipulatives with things like letter tiles or magnets. Bonus if you have letter manipulatives that connect the letters for each grapheme like /sh/. I got magnetic sets from Lakeshore when I first started teaching!
I have the perfect resource to work on blending CVC words once your kids know the sound for each written letter (phonics)! Be sure to check out my Word Family Decoding (reading) & Encoding (spelling) task cards below!
Activities to SEGMENT Phonemes
MODEL
Again, tap those fingers! Or use other manipulatives to kinesthetically associate each sound with 1 tap. First, say the whole word, then tap the sounds in that word. It might sound like, “Shut”. “/sh/ /u/ /t/”. Think of it being the reverse of blending above.
PRACTICE
Give your kids mats with sound boxes (in my CVC resource above) or draw some straight lines on a little whiteboard. The, place out your non-letter manipulatives like the ones mentioned above in the blending practice. Students will move each manipulative to a sound box as they say each sound!
PLEASE, please have them learn to tap each sound with their fingers. If you do nothing else, please do this! WHY? It will HELP THEM TREMENDOUSLY when they are ready to spell. I can’t even tell you how much the finger-sound tapping technique impacted my students when I learned about it! All of a sudden, my students were hearing more sounds, analyzing their spelling patters and were sooo much more successful! TAP THOSE FINGERS!!
Make it engaging by adding novelty items like toy cars (slowly drive each sound), finger puppets (hop each sound), wands (tap each sound), taping a picture onto a pencil or any small manipulative that goes with your unit at the time. You could also use balls of play-doh to smash or the popular rubber pop-it toys that are like never-ending bubble-wrap! Again, bust out those sound mats so that students have some guidance while practicing the skill!
EXTEND
Activities to ISOLATE Phonemes
MODEL
Work on isolating the 1st sound in words. Then work on isolating the last sound in words. Finally work on isolating the middle sound in words. In my experience, it really helps to start with manipulatives. I had circle magnets that I used on my teaching whiteboard. I would say a word aloud (not writing the word) and ask questions like “what is the 1st sound in /shut/”? Or “where is the /k/ in /cat/?
Move to working on isolating ending sounds, then middle sounds. When I felt like most of my students didn’t rely on the manipulative scaffold as much, we would use our fingers like we had learning with blending and segmenting.
Eventually you will work on isolating sounds in each syllable too! This will really help with spelling using phoneme-grapheme mapping that is backed by the science of reading!
Have fun isolating rimes and changing the onsets in rhyming words! Be sure to check out my Sounds Like Fun program that I mentioned in this blog post and my video because it is full of 30 word families with pictures to use!
PRACTICE
I’m thinking of my small group practice here. Just like with blending and segmenting, I started with my 2 essentials: Sound mats for words with 2-3 sounds, non-letter manipulatives like plastic square tiles.
We would do a variety of either pointing to the sound tile or moving the sound tile into the sound box with whatever sound I wanted to isolate. It might sound like, “The word is shut. Point to /sh/”. or “slide the /sh/ in the word shut”. The child would either point to the manipulative in the correct sound box or slide the manipulative into the correct sound box.
Since this can be a challenging task, some kids, especially those who have learned letter-sound correspondence, might need letter manipulatives to scaffold their learning. Each child’s brain is different and has different needs. It is important for kids to have both sound-only and letter-correspondence skills, but may need to practice different ways.
EXTEND
Activities to Manipulate Phonemes
EXTEND
My favorite activity to manipulate sounds is chaining! Chaining starts with taking 1 sound from a word and changing it to make a new word. From that new word, change one sound (it could be the beginning, middle or end sound) to make another new word. Keep changing sounds to make new words. I typically teach chaining on my whiteboard in a vertical list. Let’s use our example words from above: /shut/ /cut/ /cat/. It would start with me writing the word “shut”, saying it aloud and each sound. “Let’s change /sh/ to /c/. What do we get?” “cut“. “Let’s change /u/ to /a/. What do we get”? “cat“.
Now, you might be thinking, “Wait, you start with showing letters when you teach chaining instead of sounds”? That’s right, I do. I eventually teach both ways, but I have found that letters are a good scaffold for this difficult skill during whole group lessons. In small group lessons I chain with and without letters for each group to see where kids are and what kind of scaffolds they need to build the skill.
PRACTICE
Bust out those letter and non-letter manipulatives for chaining!
In small group practice I use CVC words families to start because I like starting with manipulating 1st sounds in words. We have 3 non-letter tiles. I say the word “cat”. What are the sounds? Kids say, “/k/ /a/ /t/”. I say Change the /k/ to /b/(You can see my resources in this blog post!
My Sounds Like Fun has written chaining activities for each lesson, so you don’t have to come up with it. It also has picture cards for each lesson if you want to use pictures while you practice the words!
After we have practiced with manipulating the 1st sound, we move to practicing with the last sound and middle sound.
Eventually you can chain with prefixes, suffixes, blends and more. I found that my kids had a much harder time at this point, but is something they can learn as they practice like any other skill!
EXTEND
BUILDING OTHER PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS
Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, phonological awareness is an umbrella term that is the ability to hear and manipulate units of oral language like sounds, syllables, onset & rime in words. Yep, hear, not see or read.
My ideas above to practice phonemic awareness fall under this umbrella term. A lot of my extensions build other phonological awareness skills like working with syllable, onset & rime, prefixes & suffixes. So, go check back under each skills “extend” for more ideas.
One of my favorite phonological awareness skills is hearing both words in a compound word and then identifying what the compound word is! You can either put both words together or dissect the compound word into its parts!
