Phonological awareness is a broad skill that includes identifying and manipulating larger units of oral language—parts such as words, syllables, onsets and rimes, and individual sounds (phonemes).
Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to focus on and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. Acquiring phonemic awareness is important because it is the foundation for spelling and word recognition skills. Phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of how well children will learn to read during the first two years of instruction.
What this feels like to me
- “I don’t know any words that rhyme with cat.”
- “What do you mean when you say what sounds are in the word brush?”
- “I’m not sure how many syllables are in my name.”
What I can do to help myself
- Be willing to play word and sounds games with parents or teachers.
- Be patient with learning new information related to words and sounds. Giving the ears a workout is difficult!
- Practice hearing the individual sounds in words. It may help to use plastic chips to represent each sound you hear in a word.
What I see at home
- She has difficulty thinking of rhyming words for a simple word like cat (such as rat or bat).
- He doesn’t show interest in language play, word games, or rhyming.
- She isn’t able to break compound words into the individual words (such as sunflower = sun + flower).
What I can do to help
- Do sound-related activities, such as helping your child think of a number of words that start with the /m/ or /ch/ sound, or other beginning sounds.
- Make up silly sentences with words that begin with the same sound, such as “Nobody was nice to Nancy’s neighbor.”
- Use computer games designed to build your child’s phonemic skills.
- Read books with rhymes.
- Teach your child rhymes, short poems, and songs.
You can find activities you can do at home to support your child with this skill below!
What I see in the classroom
- She doesn’t correctly complete blending activities; for example, putting together the sounds /k/ /i/ /ck/ to make the word kick.
- He doesn’t correctly complete phoneme substitution activities; for example, changing the /m/ in mate to /cr/ in order to make crate.
- She has a hard time telling how many syllables there are in the word paper
What I can do to help
- Consider teaching phonological and phonemic skills in small groups since students will likely be at different levels of expertise.
- Make sure your school’s reading program and other materials include skill building on phonemes, especially in kindergarten and first grade, and systematic instruction in phonics.
Activities to do at home!
- Letter Sound Trip: This low-prep activity encourages your child to connect letter names and letter sounds.
- Syllable Sort: Choose words from a favorite book or thematic words to help your child practice identifying the number of syllables in a word.
- Sound Isolation: This quick activity helps your child isolate initial and end sounds.
- Rhyming Games: Rhyming activities can be done anywhere, and they help children learn to manipulate sounds.
- Mirror mouths: Use a mirror to support your child in identifying how their mouth changes to make different sounds.
- I-Spy with sounds: Play I-Spy with letter sounds (ex. I spy something that starts with the same first sound as rug)
- Robbie the Robot: Click to see a robot activity that helps students work on segmenting and blending words.
- Chaining: Build an oral word chain by having your child repeat and manipulate words by changing one sound each turn. (Ex. Say hop, now change the /h/ to /m/. What word did you make? Now change the /o/ to /a/.
- 20 Phonemic Awareness activities for students (95percentgroup.com)
- Mirror Mouths: Have your child look at how their mouth moves as they make sounds while looking in the mirror
- Rhyming games: “How many words can you think of that rhyme with cat?”
- I-Spy with Sounds: “I spy something that starts with th”
- Word chains: Say a word and then change the first or last letter. “cat… bat…sat… sad…mad”
- Cheerleader Chants: Using letter sounds, not letter names, say “C-A-T… What does that spell? CAT!”
- Robbie the Robot: Select to see a robot activity that helps children work on segmenting and blending sounds
- For more activities please visit the 95% Group Website
This page is adapted from
Reading Rockets, a collaborative project of Reading Rockets, The Access Center and LD OnLine,