As we settle into our routines after the new year, one familiar friend is showing up in nearly every literacy lesson: Phonemic Awareness.
Phonological Awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the sounds within words and has been recognized through an extensive body of research as one of the five pillars of literacy.
In the early stages, Phonological Awareness could look like recognizing words that rhyme or being able to produce a rhyming word (even a made up word) when given a word. It might also look like clapping syllables or identifying what sound a word begins or ends with.
For beginning readers, the phonological awareness tasks we must demonstrate become more advanced as we start connecting the sounds we hear in words to the letters that represent them, otherwise known as phonics. We start by counting and identifying the sounds we hear in words with two or three sounds, like the word “cat”. Then we move into counting and/or identifying sounds in words with four, five, or even six individual sounds, like As readers become more advanced, they circle back around to segmenting words into syllables and counting sounds within those syllables to think about how those sounds might be spelled.
Walking into any classroom, you might see any number of activities working on this foundational literacy skill from reading nursery rhymes, to counting sounds with fingers or manipulatives, to using “sound boxes” to “sound out” words, to using manipulatives to read and write word parts. Everywhere you look in literacy, you will find phonological awareness at its heart.