Phonemic Awareness

For younger children, one of the first indications of future reading success is their ability to hear sounds and discriminate between them, this is called phonemic awareness. I know some kindergarten classes now have little mirrors to work on this skill. The children say certain words or letter sounds and notice how the position of their mouth and tongue change with each sound. The children are becoming more phonemically aware by doing this activity.
For example, the children would say the word b-a-t. The letter sounds would be segmented and the children would notice the position of their mouth and tongue would change with each segmented sound. Phonemic awareness is totally an oral activity. The children are not involved at this point in visually looking at letters that make these sounds. In the last few years the importance of phonemic awareness and its correlation to reading has been significant. If you teach kindergarten and preschool, phonemic awareness activities should be incorporated each day. The website below is an excellent resource for gaining a greater understanding of this.

http://reading.uoregon.edu/pa/pa_teach.php

The link below has great video clips of a child who experiences difficulty with phonemic awareness and one that has a good foundation:

http://reading.uoregon.edu/pa/pa_benchmarks_2.php

Click on the link below for more ideas that can be incorporated into Kindergarten and Preschool Activities:

Preschool and Kindergarten Activities