What’s so Important about Phonemic Awareness?

Did you know that playing with and practicing oral language helps children become better readers?

Children need to have a strong understanding of spoken language before they can understand written language. This knowledge of how language works is called phonemic awareness.

Phonemic Awareness is the ability to

• hear sounds that make up words
• see relationships between sounds
• change or rearrange sounds to create new words

Here are some ways you can help your child develop their phonemic awareness, which will help your child become a better reader:

• Draw your child’s attention to the sounds of his or her language with silly songs, poems, and nursery rhymes.
  • Down by the Bay by Raffi
  • If You’re Happy and You Know It by Nicki Weiss
  • Check out our video of Tutti Ta on the Literacy Doc YouTube Channel
• Read and reread stories that play with language.
  • Silly Sally by Audrey Wood
  • Suess books
    • The Foot Book (Random House, 1968)
    • Hop on Pop (Random House, 1963)
    • One Fish Two Fish Read Fish Blue Fish (Random House, 1960)
    • There’s a Wocket in my Pocket (Random House, 1974)
  • Oink! Moo! How Do You Do? A Book of Animal Sounds by Grace Maccarone (Scholastic, 1994)
  • I Love Trains! by Philemon Sturges (HarperCollins, 2001).
  • Nursery rhymes
• Have your child listen to and chant along with stories on tape. You can even make your own tape of songs and stories for your child to enjoy.
• Substitute and delete letters from common words to create your own silly sayings. For example, substitute N for S to change Sammy eats salami to Nammy eats namali.

“One of the best indicators of how well students will learn how to read is their ability to recite nursery rhymes when they walk into kindergarten” (Hall & Cunningham, 2008)

For phonemic awareness, children need to be able to

• hear sounds
• know where the sounds are in words
• understand the role the sounds play within a word

The path to phonemic awareness is sequential, beginning with awareness of spoken words, then to syllables, followed by onsets and rimes, and finally to individual sounds within a word.

An onset is all of the sounds in a word that come before the first vowel. A rime is the first vowel in a word and all the sounds that follow. For example, in the word flight , the onset is fl- and the rime is –ight.

Phonemic awareness and phonics are not the same thing; however, phonemic awareness and phonics are mutually dependent.

Phonemic awareness focuses on the sound units (phonemes) used to make up spoken words; phonics is the relationship between sounds and written symbols (letters).

Before phonics can be taught, phonemic awareness is essential. Children need to know phonemic sounds to successfully read and write. Teaching and reinforcing phonemic awareness should be meaningful, playful, and interactive.

As shared above, phonemic awareness follows a sequence and can be broken down into stages:

Stage 1,

• children hear and identify similar word patterns
• children listen for and detect spoken syllables (syllable counting)

Stage 2,

• children identify onsets and rimes
• children blend individual sounds to form a word

Stage 3,

• children identify where a given sound is heard in a word
• children identify beginning, middle, and ending sounds in a word

Stage 4,

• children count the number of phonemes in a word
• children identify individual sounds within a word

Stage 5,

• children substitute beginning, middle, and ending sounds of a word
• children omit beginning, middle, and ending sounds of a word

Check out 10 of our favorite phonemic awareness activities here.