Phonemic+Awareness

=Phonemic awareness= is the ability to hear the separate sounds, or phonemes, that make up a word. Spelling is not a factor. Read an International Reading Association article about phonemic awareness [|here.] (www.reading.org)

The idea that phonemic awareness has nothing to do with looking at letters is often confusing to both parents and teachers. Phonemic awareness skills are auditory in nature. Playing rhyming games while riding in the car is an excellent example of practicing phonemic awareness. Asking what else starts with the same sound as your name is a phonemic awareness activity. Telling a child two sounds, (/i/ /t/), and hearing if they can put them together to say the word "it" is an exercise in phoneme manipulation. Phonemic awareness is not looking at letters on flash cards and saying their sounds. That is phonics. Phonemic awareness can easily be presented to preschool children in many fun and entertaining activities such as songs, games, and [|nursery rhymes]. Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize that sounds make up words. Phonemic awareness is not sounding out letters. It can be simple as looking at a picture and identifying the beginning sound, ending sound, or segmenting each sound they hear in the word. It can also be simple as giving a child the segmented sounds "c-a-t" and having them blend the sounds to tell you the word. Phonemic awareness is a fundamental skill that all children need to be successful readers and writers. =Phonemic Awareness interactive tutorials and games can be found [|here.]=