Our annual book study with Abbie from Kindergarten Chaos is 7 Mighty Moves; the first chapter is about phonemic awareness. Please keep reading to learn how we bring phonemic awareness activities into our classroom.
What Is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear the individual sounds in words. Phonemic awareness is so important that poor phonemic awareness is considered the most common cause of reading difficulties. Studies show that phonics improves as phonemic awareness improves, and intentional phonemic awareness instruction beginning in kindergarten can prevent reading problems.
How To Teach Phonemic Awareness
- Phonemic awareness is best taught in short and frequent sessions (about 30 minutes a week)
- Research is now showing it’s best to start with phonemic awareness since phoneme level skills directly support writing and spelling (larger pieces of language such as syllables should be a priority in preK)
- Intentionally integrate phonemic awareness into phonics (which is what our TKS BOOTCAMP curriculum does)
Phonemic Awareness Activities: Oral Blending
Oral blending is one of the easiest activities to bring into your classroom. It’s also necessary for students to orally blend words before they can blend written words. If they can’t do it orally, they won’t be able to do it on paper. Simply say the sounds in a word, and students will blend the sounds into the word. For example, say c-a-t and the students say cat.
Make oral blending fun by taking the class on a trip! This activity uses one of the recommended strategies: gestures. Check out this video to see this activity in action!
Phonemic Awareness Activities: Word Chains
Word chaining is when you change one sound in a word to make new sounds. This can be done in many ways: dry-erase boards, letter tiles, and magnetic letters. It can also be done in whole groups or small groups. Here are a couple of word-chaining activities from our classroom! One of the activities uses foam shapes. I wrote letters on the foam shapes. The other uses giant foam blocks that I found at a teaching conference!
Phonemic Awareness: Use Dictation
Dictation helps students connect the sound they hear to the letter they see. You can do dictation with whiteboards, chalkboards, paper, and more! You can do it in whole groups and small groups.
- Say a word two times
- The student repeats the word two times
- orally segment the sounds in the word (we hold up our fingers as we say the sounds)
- Students spell the word while saying the sounds
Take Aways
Here are my takeaways from chapter 1:
Gestures! We have a gesture for each sound, which helps my students (especially with middle sounds i and e). Research says this is a best practice and should be encouraged! Another way we use gestures is when segmenting sounds. When we segment, we hold up a finger for each sound. Not only is this research-based, but it’s also proven in the classroom. The students who use their fingers when segmenting sounds on our benchmark assessments score better!
Articulation: When teaching sounds, we focus on what our mouth, teeth, and tongue are doing. One thing from this chapter I will bring into my classroom is using mirrors when writing and dictating. This will help students spell the correct sounds.
Research: We’re always learning and improving how we teach. Science is always changing, and we always have more to learn! The more we learn, the more effective we become at teaching! We constantly evaluate and update our science of reading resources to ensure they are the best they can be and are always aligned with best practices and the most current research.
Resources
We have made this easy with our new Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp™! We created this resource with Professor Holly Ehle, based on current research and best practices. I have tested this classroom-proven resource with the students in my own classroom!
Here is my newest favorite phonemic awareness tool! Everything Blocks! These are great for word chaining! Click the image below and use the code SMORGIE to save 20%!
For more information, check out these posts:
Be sure to visit Abbie at Kindergarten Chaos for her thoughts on chapter 1 of 7 Mighty Moves.
