What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is:
The ability to hear the individual parts of words, separate the parts, put them back together and then change them to make new words
It is a strong indicator of reading success (once you add print, it become phonics),Usually developed naturally through reading rhyming books, singing songs, and chanting nursery rhymes.It is usually secure by the end of first grade.
A student with developed phonemic awareness can:
Enjoy language and play with its sounds
Understand that what we speak can be divided into
individual words-concept of word
Break words into syllables (parts/chunks)
Provide rhyming words, find the words that rhyme
Segment words into their individual phonemes (sounds) cat
becomes /c/ /a/ /t/
Blend individual phonemes (sounds) into words: /d/ /o/ /g/
becomes dog
Identify the beginning, middle and ending sounds in words
Match words with the same beginning sound
Change beginning or ending sounds orally to make new word.
Phonemic awareness has nothing to do with intelligence, but children without it will have a difficult if not impossible time learning the sound-spelling correspondences (phonics).
