Literacy

Phonemic Awareness

 

Phonemic awareness teaches students to hear individual sounds in words, and this supports the development of strong reading and writing skills. “Phonemic awareness has been shown to be a very powerful predictor of later reading achievement. In fact, it [phonemic awareness] is a better predictor than more global measures such as IQ or general language proficiency” (Griffith and Olson, 1992).

 

At Kismet Park your child engages in daily Phonic review sessions that encompass phonemic awareness activities. These activities are sometimes called ear exercises because the focus is on hearing the parts or sounds in words. Sometimes, your child will not be seeing these words in print during the Phonic review sessions.

 

How Can You Support Phonemic Awareness at Home? 

Phonemic awareness is simple to support at home–all you need is language! Help your child understand that the words they hear in speech are made up of parts and sounds. You can begin building phonological awareness in your child by: 

 

★ Reciting nursery rhymes 

★ Reading books with rhyming words 

★ Playing with alliteration (words that begin with the same sound) For Example: Seven silly sisters said surprise! 

★ Reciting tongue twisters with a focus on individual sounds in words. For Example: She sells seashells for the sea shore 

★ Wacky Words! Give your child a nonsense “wacky” word and have them generate another nonsense word that rhymes with it. Say, “Tell me a wacky word that rhymes with zork?” Your child would then generate a nonsense word like →lork, bork, etc. Try rhyming with these words too: gax - vob - zunk - tark - foop - sout 

★ Can you blend (put together) three sounds to make a word? Say the sounds n - ĕ - t, your child will repeat those sounds back and then tell you the whole word, Child: n - ĕ - t → net. h - ŏ - p → hop s - ă - t → sat b - ī - k → bike 

★ Can you segment (separate) these words into their individual sounds? Say the word map, your child will repeat the word and then segment the word into individual sounds, Child: map → m - ă - p . rope → r - ō - p name → n - ā - m feed → f - ē - d 

★ Books to enjoy together: Look for these books at the library to have more fun with “Wacky Words”! 

-Runny Babbit by Shel Silverstein 

-Cock-A-Doodle-Moo by Bernard Mos

*Sourced from https://heggerty.org/