A previous article discussed phonemic awareness and its importance. This article will take a closer look into how to effectively teach phonemic awareness to children.
Phonemic awareness is a concept that can be learned and taught. During phonemic awareness instruction, children learn to recognize, manipulate, work with, and listen to spoken words.
There are several activities that can be used to help teach phonemic awareness to children.
Primary level teachers may use any or all of the following during their classroom instruction.
Phoneme Isolation: During this activity children are instructed on how to find certain sounds in a word. For example, the teacher may ask the students to identify the beginning sound, middle sound, or final sound of a word.
Phoneme Identity: During this activity children identify words with the same sounds. Teachers may ask students to name words that begin with the same sound. The teacher may also name a list of words and ask the students to identify what sound they have in common.
Phoneme Categorization: In phoneme categorization, students identify groups of words that belong together. The teacher may give a list of words that all have the same beginning except for one. She may ask the students to name the word that does not belong.
Phoneme Blending: In this activity, students separate the sounds of words, they are asked to put the sounds back together. The teacher will say the separate sounds of a word and the student will name the word. For example the teacher may say /c/ /a/ /t/ and the student should respond cat.
Phoneme Segmentation: This is the opposite of Phoneme Blending. In this activity, students separate words into sounds. Instead of putting the word back together, the teacher will name the word and the student will say each sound of the word.