Phonemic
awareness
A phrase that you may
have heard your child’s teacher use is phonemic
awareness. It sounds a little like a word you probably
know - phonics - and they are related because they both
have to do with sounds.
Phonics refers to the relationship between letters and their sounds that are
used in writing and reading. The premise of phonics is that every letter (or, in
some cases, combinations of letters) has its own sound (in some cases, more than
one sound).
Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and tell the difference between
words, sounds, and syllables in speech. These are four elements of phonemic
awareness:
Rhyme: Children
can recognize rhyme when they hear it and they can produce rhymes on their own.
Poems and songs are excellent for teaching rhymes. If you know the song “Down
by the Bay,” this is an excellent way to teach this aspect:
Down by the bay, where the
watermelons grow,
Back tp my home, I dare not go,
For if I do, my mother will
say,
“Have you ever seen a goat
Sitting in a boat
Down by the bay?”
There are many possibilities,
all of which need to have rhyming words: Have you ever seen a whale with
a polkadot tail; Have you ever seen Daniel with a cocker spaniel,
etc.
Hearing syllables: Children begin to
understand the concept of syllables when they clap them out for their own names.
They can identify how many syllables are in words they or you say, and they can
come up with words that have the number of syllables you ask for: two, three,
four, etc.
Blending:
This is an important concept because many words in our language have
consonants that blend into each other. On the simplest level, we say or read the
letters of words, like the sounds of “c,” “a,” and “t.” Then the
child repeats them in order, first slowly, and then more quickly, until
she is saying “cat.” In the reverse process, this is what we usually mean
when we suggest that children “sound out” an unfamiliar word to see what it
says.
Segmentation:
When a child is writing a word, saying it slowly can help with the
spelling. She may need adult help at first. The best thing you can do is help
her to hear the word sound-by-sound: ba-na-na, ta-b-le. Of course, letters that
aren’t heard won’t be written, but we accept the phonetic representations
with beginning writers.
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This article has been incorporated and
expanded in Teach
Your Children Well: A Teacher’s Advice for Parents.
This article is reprinted with the author's permission.
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