1. Phonemic Awareness

2. Phonemic Awareness Pre K-Grade One
Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, hear, and manipulate the sounds or phonemes that compose words in spoken language.
It involves:
Segmenting-pulling apart words into sounds
Blending-putting sounds back together
Manipulating-adding, deleting and substituting these sounds

3. Phonemic Awareness (continued)
Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in spoken words
/m/ /a/ /p/
First Second Third
There are phonemes in our spoken speech
Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill that consists of multiple components and does not involve print.

4. What is the difference between Phonemic and Phonological Awareness ?
• Broad term -includes phonemic awareness
• Identify and manipulate larger parts of spoken language
• Alliteration, rhyme, words, and syllables
Phonemic Awareness
• Narrower, subcategory of phonological awareness
• Identify and manipulate individual sounds of spoken words (Opitz 2000)

5. Research says….
Explicitly and systematically teaching children to manipulate phonemes significantly improves children’s reading, comprehension and spelling abilities.
Phonemic awareness and letter knowledge are strong predictors of later reading success
Adams, Foorman, Lundberg & Beeler (1998)

6. Phonological Awareness Continuum
Type
Description
Example
Phonemic Awareness
Blending phonemes into words, segmenting words into individual phonemes, and manipulating phonemes in spoken words
/k/ /a/ /t/
/sh/ /i/ /p/
/s/ /t/ /o/ /p/
Onset and Rimes
Blending and segmenting the initial consonant or consonant cluster (onset) and the vowel and consonant sounds that follow (rime)
/m/ /ice/
/sh/ /ake/
Syllables
Combining syllables to say words or segmenting spoken words into syllables
/mag/ /net/
/pa/ /per/
Sentence Segmentation
Segmenting sentences into spoken words
The dog ran away.
Alliteration
Rhyme
Listening
Producing groups of words that begin with the same initial sound
Matching the ending sounds of words
Oral language-hearing lots of stories
ten tiny tadpoles
cat, hat, bat, sat

7. Typical Age at which Phonemic Awareness Skill Domains are Accomplished4
Rhyme, alliteration 5
Rhyme, phoneme matching, syllables
5.5
Onset-rime initial, initial consonant isolation 6
Phoneme blending, segmentation
6.5
Phoneme segmentation, blending, substitution 7
Initial and final sound deletion 8
Deletion with blends 9
Longer and more complex deletion tasks

8. Assessments
Yopp-Singer Test of Phoneme Segmentation
(1995) The Reading Teacher,
DIBELS and AIMSweb

9. Activities to Develop Phonemic Awareness:
Yopp and Yopp’s (2000) instructional sequence:
Focus on rhyme: “Think of something that rhymes with look.”
Focus on syllable units: “Clap twice for Jacob’s name.”
Focus on onset and rime: “What is the first sound in boat?”
Focus on phonemes: “Please put these sounds together: /b/-/e/-/d/
This sequence mirrors the general stages of phonemic awareness development
Rhyme-answer book
Syllable unit: /ja/(clap)- /kob/(clap)
Onset and rime /b/
Phonemes-bed

10. Elkonin (1973) Boxes Ant Bat Bath Beach Bed Bee Boat Book Boot Bus Can
Cup
Dish
Dog
Duck
Feet
Fish
Fist
Fort
Frog
Goat
Hand
Hat
Hut
Jeep
Jet
Jump
Kick
Lamp
Log
Map
Mask
Mom
Nest
Net
Nut
Pea
Peach
Pen
Pig
Pot
Rain
Ring
Rock
Run
Saw
Sheep
Ship
Sun
Teeth
Three
Tooth
Town
Tree
Daniil El’konin is a soviet psychologist and former student of Vygotsky

11. Sound Activities Elkonin Boxes ~ Practice with 2:00 appointment
Sound matching, isolation, blending segmenting and substitution.
Multisensory Techniques for Phonemic Awareness Drills- Anchoring sounds and words
(Greene 1997)
You use left arm, students use right.
Repeat sounds (auditory reinforcement)
Anchor the Word~two times ~ “Say mat” “Say the first sound in mat”
Phoneme Segmentation ~Anchor word two times “Say the sounds in stop” Use fingers on hand –anchor-word

12. Sound Activities continued…
Rhyming, Alliteration, Segmenting, Blending
Guessing and Name games
Koosh Ball
Hink Pink’s
What do you call a chubby kitty?
What do you call an angry father?
What do you call a huge hog?
What do you call a rabbit that tells jokes?
What do you call a wet pouch?