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.

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