We are continuing with our Literacy Learning feature started last week. This week, we are focusing on Phonemic Awareness - teaching children to notice, articulate, and manipulate the smallest sounds in words. As students step into literacy, the act of learning to efficiently untangle, discriminate, segment, blend, and manipulate those tiny little sound slices becomes very important. 

Phonemes are the individual sounds in words. For example, the letter b makes the sound (phoneme) /b/. T makes the sound /t/. Two letters can make one phoneme. Sh makes only one sound but is represented by two letters. When practicing phonemic awareness with your child, practicing without text is easy and very helpful. Blending sounds together (/c/ /a/ /t/ makes 'cat') and segmenting words into individual sounds (log has the sounds /l/ /o/ /g/) are  necessary skills that lead to stronger decoding and spelling. 

Ways to Support at Home

• During reading at home, identify how many words are in a sentence, clap the syllables in a word, play with rhyming words
• Use a mirror or have children look at you to notice what the the mouth, lips and tongue do when making different sounds
• Play with blending phonemes together into words (c-a-t) and breaking words into phonemes (what sounds do you hear in the word cat?)

-paraphrased from Shifting the Balance by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates