You can improve your students' ability to read unfamiliar words without even showing them a single letter. One of the major skills before one learns to decode printed words is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds, which are called phonemes. A student who is phonemically aware is able to isolate sounds, manipulate sounds, blend and segment the sounds into spoken and eventually written words.
Phonemic awareness differs from phonics in that it is all auditory. Phonemic awareness focuses on sounds (phonemes) in spoken language, whereas phonics focuses on letters (graphemes) and their corresponding sounds in written language and print.
There are six layers of phonemic awareness:
1. Phoneme Isolation:
hearing and isolating individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.
2. Blending:
phoneme blending is basically combining to create words
(/c/ /a/ /t/ - cat).
3. Segmenting:
dividing a spoken word into its component sounds (mad - /m/ /a/ /d/)
4. Addition: adding phonemes to a given word to produce a new word; starting with the word bell and adding the phoneme /t/ at the ends makes the new word belt.
5. Deletion: starting with a word and deleting one phoneme to make a new word; starting with the word bite and deleting the final phoneme /t/ to make the new word buy.
6. Substitution: This last skills comprises all 5 lower layers of phonemic awareness. It is knowing how to add and delete phonemes. Start with need, change /n/ to /s/, and the new word is seed.
These are the Common Core State Standards for Phonological Awareness for Kindergarten:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.2: Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.2a: recognize and and produce rhyming words
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.2b: count, produce, blend, and segment syllables in spoken words.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.2c: blend and segment onsets and rimes of single-syllable spoken words.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.2d: isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds in CVC words.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.2e: add or substitute sounds in simple, one-syllable words to make new words.
Notice how rhyming is not included in phonemic awareness. That is because it does not focus on individual sounds in words, but rhyming is a helpful first step in phonemic awareness. Rhyming, syllabification (a word or word segment that is produced as a single sound), and onset and rime (two parts of a word: the first part is the onset, such as /m/ in map; the second part is the rime, such as /ap/ in map) are part of the broader phonological awareness necessary for learning to read.
In Wonders for Kindergarten, I found daily phonemic awareness activities in both whole group reading and small group differentiated instruction.
Our Wonders program also has a phonemic awareness guide. It is listed as a Tier II intervention resource.
Thank you for showing us how important the reading foundations are for primary students. Your phonemic awareness definitions are so important! I remember at a workshop, someone mentioned that phonemic awareness is anything a student can do with their eyes closed as opposed to phonics which is the skills needed for a printed page. Love this blog!
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