Learning to Blend is Not Enough- the 8 Essential Phonemic Awareness Skills Your Child Needs to Become a Solid Reader

To Whom It May Concern:

Children cannot just learn the letter sounds, decode letters and be long-term successful in reading and spelling. It seems like that is all it should take. However, studies show (and experience shows) that children must learn the relationship that sounds have to their words in order to stay on an upward trajectory of success in reading.

How do children learn the relationship that sounds have to words? There are 8 Essential skills called Phonemic Awareness Skills:

1) Rhyming- Every year I start off with teaching rhyming by pointing out rhyming that appears in books, giving two words and asking if they rhyme, allowing them to work on poems at home and recite them in class for a prize, and doing Rhyming Worksheets during class or at home. This is fun, but for some children, surprisingly, this does not come naturally.

2) Alliteration- This is when you have many words in the same sentence starting with the same letter sound. Can your child identify which sound most of those words start with? My students practice this skill in my Magic phonics readers. There are pages before the story that go over this skill. You can also make up a sentence, say it out loud and ask them which sound most of the words start with. This is an auditory skill, so if you are reading it from a book, don't let them peek! They need to identify the common beginning sound from listening to your voice.

3) Identifying Beginning Sounds- This is a skill that most teachers teach the first day they introduce a letter. It is vital that they can identify what a word starts with. Again, this is an auditory skill, so make sure that they are not looking at the word...just looking at your lips. I teach this by giving them four words. Three of the words start with the same sound. The other word starts with something different. I ask them to identify the word that start with a DIFFERENT sound than the others. We also ask them to identify the beginning sound of different objects throughout the school day during those first couple of months. I also have Alphabet Sound Worksheets I send home with them to do at home.

4) Identifying Middle Vowel Sounds- This definitely takes practice. The vowels are the "glue" in CVC words. I ask them what the middle sound is in a word that I slowly say. I point to my mouth when I get to the middle sound. I practice these in the classroom and they practice them with their parents at home in their pre-reading pages of their books. 

5) Identifying Ending Sounds- This is another one that can be tricky for pre-K. I say the word slowly and point my finger down when I get to the ending sound until they get the hang of this. Again, we practice this during class and they practice this with their parents at home in the pre-reading pages of their books.

6) Syllables- This is segmenting a word into it's separate sounds/parts. I usually practice with them when they come to this in their phonics readers pre-reading pages. I touch my chin and let them see how my chin drops once for every separate part of a word, or each syllable. As I touch my chin I hold up the number of syllables against my chin as I come to them. That way they can see what constitutes each new syllable. We also practice clapping the syllables. If I can tell they are having a hard time understanding, or focusing, I will touch their knee each time their is a new syllable. For some student the feel of my fingers, or the pressure on their knee (the sensory contact) helps them understand as an additional pathway to their brain. It can be helpful.

7) Putting segments together to make a word- This is another of these auditory skills. If you give them two separate parts of a word can they put them together to make the word? "T-ip. What's the word? Tip!" "Pl- ant. What's the word? Plant!" These are usually pretty easy for them.

8) And finally, Blending- Can they lock sounds together to blend sounds and then blend sound into words? This is my favorite! We get witches fingers to point to the letters and slide our fingers under to keep the sounds going, running into each other...making the sounds touch. We practice this every day in our books. The pre-reading pages help them progress to more and more difficult combinations of blending. It can be nonsense words or real words. The important thing is to make the sounds touch each other! Hold the sound out into the next sound. This helps them feel confident and able to decode any combination of letter sounds.

Studies show that if children do well with phonemic awareness skills at a younger age they were found to be stronger readers in the following grades. (Bramlett and Gilbertson 1998) Phonological awareness skills are strongly associated with both a child's decoding ability and reading comprehension. Another study (Swank 1994) clearly showed that phonemic awareness can be developed through instruction and that doing so can significantly accelerate a child's reading and writing achievement. This has definitely been the case in my private preschool for the last decade and for my mentor's private preschool for the forty years before that. In my books, there are 3-4 pre-reading pages before the story in each book that walk a parent, aide, or teacher through teaching these skills. They work like magic!