Phonemic Awareness 101




I do. We do. You do.

Effective phonemic awareness instruction teaches children to notice, think about, and work with sounds. You may use many activities to build phonemic awareness. Here is an example of each:

Phoneme Isolation:
Children recognize individual sounds in a word.
Teacher ~ What is the first sound in "wig"?
Student ~ The first sound in wig is /w/.


Phoneme Identity:
Children recognize the same sounds in different words.
Teacher ~ What sound is the same in "dog, dip, and den"?
Student ~ The first sound, /d/, is the same.

Phoneme Categorization:
Children recognize the word in a set of three or four words that has the "odd" sound.
Teacher ~ Which word doesn't belong: "hen, hat, rug".
Student ~ Rug does not belong. It doesn't begin with /h/.


Phoneme Blending:
Children listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes, and then combine the phonemes to form a word. Then they write and read the word.
Teacher ~ What word is /b/ /e/ /d/?
Student ~ /b/ /e/ /d/ is bed.
Teacher ~ Now let's write the sounds bed: /b/, write b; /e/, write e; /d/, write d.
Teacher ~ Writes the word on the board. Now we're going to read the word bed.

Phoneme Segmentation:
Children break a word into its separate sounds, saying each sound as the tap out or count it.
Then they write and read the word.
Teacher ~ How many sounds are in "frog"?
Student ~ /f/ /r/ /o/ /g/. Four sounds.


Phoneme Deletion
Children recognize the word that remains when a phoneme is removed from another word.
Teacher ~ What is "smile" without the /s/?
Student ~ Smile without the /s/ is mile.


Phoneme Addition
Children make a new word by adding a phoneme to an existing word.
Teacher ~ What word do you have if you add /s/ to the beginning of "park"?
Student ~ Spark.

Phoneme Substitution
Children substitue one phoneme for another to make a new word.
Teacher ~ The word is "bug". Change /g/ to /n/. What's the new word?
Student ~ Bun.

Resource ~ Put Reading First...The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read