Students need phonemic awareness lessons because phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are the foundation of learning to read.
Phonological awareness is knowing that language is made up of words, rhymes, syllables, and sounds.
Phonemic awareness is a component of phonological awareness. It involves hearing and identifying individual sounds in words, manipulating sounds, and blending sounds together to make words.
Research suggests that difficulty with phonemic and phonological awareness early on can indicate poor reading and spelling skills. This resource is designed to give students the necessary foundation and help address those gaps.
Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp uses systematic, research-based, classroom-proven best practices to build the necessary phonemic awareness skills for students to become successful readers and writers.
Phonemic Awareness Activities: What Is Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp?
Our Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp is a research-based, classroom-proven tool to teach phonemic awareness and phonological awareness skills. There are eight units of skills included, and the skills move from the biggest sounds to the smallest.
Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp: How Does It Work?
Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp is designed to be done in short mini-lessons because the research tells us this is best practice. In our classroom, these lessons take about 10 minutes. The phonemic awareness lessons are done before we start our TKS BOOTCAMP phonics curriculum lessons for the day. For example, we do a 10-minute lesson from Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp, and then move into our ABC BOOTCAMP circle chart for the day. This is all done as part of our foundational skills block. By doing the two together, we connect the sounds to the spelling. Then, during ABC BOOTCAMP/TKS BOOTCAMP, we’re getting additional phonemic awareness practice.
Another note about the lessons and skills in Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp: You don’t need to do every lesson for each skill. Here’s why: once your students have mastered the skill, you can move on. This will vary from class to class, so there is no set scope and sequence other than the skills should be done in order from one to eight.
What Does Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp Look Like In The Classroom?
We included a symbol for each skill. The symbol also serves as a visual cue of the skill, and in some cases, it becomes a tool for learning. The symbols can be printed from the resource, or we make them with classroom objects such as sentence strips.
For each skill, you build an anchor chart with students. This gives them information about their learning and shows them the symbol for that skill.
Each skill begins with circle charts to keep learning consistent. For example, here is the circle chart of ending sounds. We identify the key picture (bag) and the key ending sound. Next, we show pictures (all included in the resource) and segment the sounds. We identify the ending sound of each word and decide if it goes on the circle chart. This is all done orally. The TKS BOOTCAMP phonics lessons that immediately follow this lesson include the written text.
Students also have the option to do the same activity independently. You can do this at the end of a skill for assessment!
Then each skill has a variety of hands-on, interactive lessons to bring these phonemic awareness activities to life.
We jump through hoops and use sentence strips and sticky notes to segment the sounds, we use roller coasters to blend sounds into words, and more!
Here’s a video of some of these activities in use in our classroom!
Phonemic Awareness Bootcamp is an all-inclusive, classroom-proven resource. Included are directions for each skill and activity, teacher background information for each skill, whole group lessons, independent practice, and all printable materials needed for the lessons.
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