Developing Phonemic Awareness in Children

Before you even start to teach your child to read you need to get them to be aware of the sounds that are around them at all times and to differentiate between sounds. This development of phonemic awareness is very important and there are many ways to do this. We have already pointed out some activities to develop phonemic awareness in this post. Now here is the second part of that, there is one more part to come.

•    Hide a doll or toy in the garden or house and tell the child they must ‘rescue’ it. Guide them towards where it is hidden by humming or singing louder as they get nearer and quieter as they get further away from the hiding place.

•    Record or download different environmental sounds such as animal noises, sounds from the city (cars, trains…) etc. and play a game where the children have to listen carefully and identify the sound they hear. You could make a lotto game where they have to match the sound to its picture or alternatively buy a commercially produced one such as Living & Learning – Soundtracks or Smartkids Animal and Nature Sound Lotto

•    Sing action songs encouraging your child to perform a range of different actions in time with the rhythm or the beat of the song. Sing songs extra slowly then extra fast or quietly then loudly. The BBC has a good page for this and another can be found here

•    Learn nursery rhymes or other songs with rhyming words and play at singing them, missing the second rhyming word for you child to fill in.

•    Clap, march, jump, skip etc. to the beat of their favourite songs.

More to come in the next post on phonemic awareness games but try these out. Not only are you teaching your child to develop phonemic awareness by doing them but you also have a lot of fun so don’t take them too seriously.

Related Articles / Extra reading

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Games and Activities to Develop Phonemic Awareness

There are plenty of games and activities you can play with your child to help develop phonemic awareness long before they are introduced to the written form of letters and sounds. As phonemic awareness is purely auditory, the games to help develop it can be played by very young children. These ideas are to help children learn to tune into, listen to, differentiate and remember different sounds all around them, not just sounds in words. More to come in the next few days

•    Go for a listening walk: tell you child that it’s a special walk and they have to notice all the sounds they can hear (cars, birds, aeroplanes, talking etc.). Get them to talk about the sounds as they hear them and also to try to imitate them. When you get back, ask them to remember what sounds they heard.

•    Take a drumstick (wooden, not chicken) into the garden and get them to listen to the different sounds it makes by tapping, stroking or dragging it against different things (wooden post, drainpipe, metal post, wire fence, plant pots…). Ask which their favourite sound is and get them to play a tune using different sounds.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

(And other common words and expressions used by teachers.)

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear phonemes in words which are spoken. Phonemes are individual sounds in words. For example the word ‘cat’ has 3 phonemes c-a-t, sometimes written as /c/ (or /k/), /a/ and /t/.  The word ‘short’ also has 3: sh-or-t. Some phonemes are written using just one letter and others need more (for example the ‘sh’ and ‘or’ in ‘short’, or ‘augh’ in ‘taught’. The letter or combination of letters used to write any one  phoneme is called a grapheme. So, phonemic awareness means that you can hear and separate each sound in any word, and blend individual sounds together to make a word. If you ask a child what sounds they hear in ‘cat’, they should be able to tell you  c-a-t. If you tell them the sounds d-o-g, they should be able to tell you that the word they are ‘guessing’ is ‘dog’.

Alongside this goes the ability to separate and identify the initial sound in a word and match words which begin with the same first sound (b-at and b-all); to take away the initial sound in a word and identify rhyming words (b-at and c-at) and also to take individual sounds out of a word to make a new one (car-t and car). When you include these last three abilities people sometimes use the wider term phonological awareness, but for ease I will use the term phonemic awareness to mean all of the above. So phonemic or phonological awareness is basically the understanding that words we hear are made up of different sounds and the ability to separate and play around with them! Phonemic awareness has nothing to do with the written word, either the reading or writing of it. However I’m sure you can see that knowing how to blend the individual sounds together will be useful in reading when you see letters written together, and how knowing how to separate the sounds in a word will help you to decide which letters to put down when writing it!

Phonics is a system used to teach reading and writing whereby the student is taught to connect each sound of a spoken word to a letter or group of letters in order to write it, and how to blend letters or groups of letters orally in a written word in order to read it. There are different types of phonics teaching and the most commonly talked about ones are explained in the next blog post tomorrow.