PHONEMIC AWARENESS
What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is a sub-set of phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is manipulating the sounds of spoken language, without involving print at all.
The child needs to be able to reproduce visual, auditory and motor patterns with minimal effort. Initial skills are in the area of rhyming and chanting skills, knowing how many words are in a sentence and being able to count the number of syllables within a word.
A child with good phonemic awareness is able to isolate the individual sounds within a specific word. The child needs to be able to hear, count and repeat all the sounds (phonemes) in a word. He should be able to blend sounds to “hear” a word. He should also be able to pull the sounds apart in a word. All these can be achieved even if the child can not yet match the written letters to the sounds.
Examples of phonemic awareness skills include:
- Can you tell if two words start the same or end the same?
- Can you remove a sound from a word?
- Can you count the sounds in a word?
- Can you blend sounds together?
- Can you remove only one sound at the end of a word?
