Phonemic Awareness

In the past, educators took for granted that children had the ability to distinguish sounds. Over the past few years there has been a better understanding that not all children have this ability. These children greatly benefit in being given assistance in this area and the push towards phonemic instruction was adapted. Phonemic awareness does not relate to identifying letters but a child's ability to distinguish sounds. I attended a session where a school gave a presentation on how they have included phonemic awareness instruction daily with their kindergarten class. They devoted 10-15 minutes every day to this. They noticed an increase in the children within their school being more successful in learning to read.

I often refer to the site that you will find in the link below because it provides you with a wealth of information on this topic and a video demonstrating instruction in this area. However, in the session I attended the children were given little hand mirrors to observe how their lips and tongue moved when they made the different sounds. They would also hold their hand close to their lips and feel the air movement as they made different sounds. This gave the children an understanding of how and why different sounds are produced.

I have included the link below for more information on this topic. Maybe you can start thinking about using little mirrors in your own phonemic instructional period.


Phonemic Awareness

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