What is Phonemic Awareness and Phonics?

Phonemic Awareness is a consciousness of individual sounds that make up spoken language and the ability to attend to those sounds, differentiate the sounds and manipulate them in speech. A child with phonemic awareness can also recognize the individual sounds that make up that word.

Children learn about words through reading and writing. The top predictors of reading achievement in first grade include phonemic awareness, knowledge of letter names, and print awareness. Children can be trained in phonemic awareness when teachers spend time each day on activities that promote listening to spoken word, awareness improves.

Phonics is integrated throughout the Balanced Literacy Model and should be an important part of each of the reading and writing components. Phonics is an instructional approach. It teaches that symbols represents sounds. Phonics attaches symbols to spoken words. In contrast, phonemic awareness is an oral activity and is the consciousness of individual phonemes and attending to sounds.

Teaching Methods

Activities should be quick, using enjoyable exercises combined with many typical classroom activities, such as reading aloud, poetry, songs, journal writing, etc. Teachers should spend approximately 15 minutes a day with these quick, high energy, game-like activities. These activities, combined with print can be powerful and productive.

** The following activities can help students practice rhyming.**

1. Tune: Do You Know the Muffin Man
Do you know two rhyming words?
Two rhyming words, two rhyming words
Do you know two rhyming words?
They sound a lot a like
Cat and bat are rhyming words
Are rhyming words
Are rhyming words
Cat and bat are fhyming words
They sound a lot a like.

Repeat with other rhyming words. Pictures work well.

2. Tune: If You're Happy and You Know It
Have you ever seen a dog on a log
Have you ever seen a dog on a log
No I've never, ever, ever
No I've never, ever, ever
No I've never seen a dog on a log.

Repeat with other rhyming words.

• Rhymes - Give children opportunities to listen to rhymes, participate in rhyming chants and songs, fill in missing rhymes, find rhymes in poems or stories or talk about rhyming words. Students can also be encouraged to create their own rhymes with classroom poetry, rhyming songs and other rhyming activities.
• Alliteration - Children enjoy saying tongue twisters. Many books are written in an alliterative style. Children can identify alliteration in stories and create class books of silly sentences showing alliteration. Stories can be in oral format, electronic format, or print format.
• Differentiating Words
  • Counting Words - Children become more familiar with words as they count the words in a sentence. Using manipulatives and recording the number of words is an enjoyable activity for students.
  • Be the Sentence - Teachers create sentence strips of sentences from a piece of literature. Children count the words as the teacher cuts the strip into individual cards. Children can then be given a word to recreate the sentence. This provides opportunities for counting words, as well as for identifying missing words by having a student turn around from the sentence group.
• Differentiating Syllables - Separating words into component parts is a skill introduced after students can separate speech into words. Teachers can lead students in clapping exercises to identify the parts of a word (syllables).
• Blending Phonemes - Teachers segment words slowly, phoneme by phoneme. Children are then asked to repeat the phonemes before saying the word. Segmented words can be used in guessing games and secret code games. Segmenting children's names provide practice in blending phonemes. An important question: "What word would we have if we put these sounds together?"
• Segmenting by Phoneme - Teachers provide activities where children are asked to focus attention on the individual sounds in words. Activities which direct children's attention to the beginning sounds of words fit into this category.
• Word Walls - Word Walls are an effective strategy for teaching high frequency words. The selection of words can vary from classroom to classroom, but the selection principle is the same...Words are included that students will need often in their reading and writing. The word wall is intended to be used as a reference for readers and writers. Words are added continually throughout the year (weekly) and at least one activity is done daily where children find, write, and chant the spelling of the words.
• Onsets and Rimes - An important component of phonemic development. While traditional phonics generalizations with vowels are unstable, phonic patterns remain stable with rimes. Rimes and Onsets are instructional tools that children successfully use. Top 37 rimes.

Classroom Activities to promote phonics (Send us your ideas! New ideas are denoted with a star.)

• Think of a work that rhymes with _____________. Then the students ask questions to determine the word that you thought of.
• Teach appropriate intonation and puncturation by having the students do the following:
  
  1. Recite the aplhabet as a conversation- ABCK? EFG! HI? JKL. MN? OPQ, RST! UVWX. YZ!
  2. Recite the same sentence using different punctuation. Dogs bark? Dogs bark! Dogs bark.
  3. Practice placing the stress on different words in the sentence- I am tired. I am tired. I am tired.
  4. Practice reading sentences as if talking to a friend.
• Word Part Hunt: assign each student a syllable, prefix, suffix, or root that you want to review. You might have students work with a partner or in small groups. Then have the children search for objects in the classroom whose names contain the work part. In addition, you might have them search through books, magazines, and newspapers for words that contain the word part.
• Graph It: Your students can create graphs that combine language arts with math concepts. For example, instruct students to search a passage for all the words with le, ble, ple, zle, and tle and list them. Have them use their list to create a bar graph showing the number of words found for each.
• Teacher has all students write the same 10 words from the word wall. The students then circle small words within each word.

  Rules for circling words:

  1. Has to be real word. (letter next to each other)
  2. Small word in a larger word. (Can't break apart chunks)
• Student flashes light on a word (flashlight) and the others write the word while saying, "flashlight, flashlight, shine your light, shine your light, and we will write. Have student either write words on a created form, or number a paper from 1 to 5.

Alphabet Soup - Dish up a bowl of soup for your students where they can explore the alphabet.

Matching Rhyming Words - Match the rhyming words!

Compound Words - Practice identifying, creating, and making compound words.

Rebus Rhymes - Read Rebus Rhymes and create your own!

Vowel Blends - Practice working with vowel blends!

Phonics and Structural Analysis from Education World (http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/phonic.html)

High Frequency Words and Vocabulary from Education World (http://www.eduplace.com/rdg/res/frequent.html)

The Phonics Room (http://members.aol.com/phonicsrm/index.html#Alphabet)

Language Skills Lesson Plans from Sunshine Online's Literacy Hour. This site provides activities, lesson plans, and resources to support teachers in developing literacy skills.

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