Phonics/Phonemic Awareness

By the K-3 grade span

Phonics Involves teaching students how to connect the sounds of

spoken English with letters or groups of letters. (c, k, ck spellings)

Phonemic Awareness Is the skill that is needed to recognize that a spoken word consist

of a sequence of individual sounds (bun, run, sun, fun)

SimilarityBoth phonics and phonemic awareness sets the foundation for

reading and writing.

Phonics vs. Phonemic Awareness

Research indicates that a child who is taught systematic phonemic awareness will learn how to notice, think about and manipulate sounds in spoken language.

The following activities are ways to build phonemic awareness:

1. Phoneme isolation 2. Phoneme identity 3. Phoneme categorization 4. Phoneme blending 5. Phoneme segmentation 6. Phoneme deletion 7. Phoneme addition 8. Phoneme substitution

Research

Children recognize individual sounds in a word

In kindergarten children are taught to isolate the beginning and end sound of words.

/b/ in the word bus /t/ in the word cat

Phoneme isolation

Children listen to a sequence of separately spoken phonemes and then combine the phonemes to form a word.

m m a m a n

Blending

Phoneme deletion- children recognize the word that remains when a phoneme is removed from another word.

Ex. – treason without the /t/ is reason. Phoneme addition- Children make a new word by

adding a phoneme to an existing word. Ex.- if you add /b/ to the beginning of rake what is

the new word? brake. Phoneme substitution- Children substitute one

phoneme for another to make a new word. Ex.- the word is run. Change the /n/ to /g/. What’s

the new word? rug

Deletion/Addition/Subtraction

Examples of games to enhance phonemic awareness instruction.

According to research-Systematic and explicit phonics instruction makes a bigger contribution to children’s growth in reading than non-systematic instruction.

Examples of phonics instruction: Embedded phonics Sight word recognition Analytic based phonics (use part of the word to

decode and read words they don’t know)

Phonics Instruction

Children are taught letter-sound relationships during the reading of connected text.

Example: Open Court Decodables

Embedded Phonics/Decodables

Words recognized immediately by the reader without he or she having to go through the process of decoding them.

Another name for sight words is High Frequency Words.

Sight Words

Children are taught to use parts of words they have already learned to read and decode words they don’t know.

Example:

Screen and green

Analogy-based phonics