ESSENTIAL 4:
Phonological & PHONEMIC Awareness
Phonological awareness as "the ability to recognize that words are made up of a variety of sound units." The term encompasses a number of sound related skills necessary for a person to develop as a reader. As a child develops phonological awareness she not only comes to understand that words are made up of small sound units (phonemes). She also learns that words can be segmented into larger sound “chunks” known as syllables and each syllable begin with a sound (onset) and ends with another sound (rime) (K12 Reader, 2014).
While phonemic awareness also involves an understanding of the ways that sounds function in words, it deals with only one aspect of sound: the phoneme. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that holds meaning. Almost all words are made up of a number of phonemes blended together. Consider the word “ball”. It is made up of three phonemes: /b/ /aw/ /l/ . Each of its sounds affects the meaning. Take away the /b/ sound and replace it with /w/ and you have an entirely different word. Change the /aw/ for an /e/ sound and again the meaning changes (K12 Reader, 2014).
The recommended practices outlined in the K-3 Essential Instructional Practices are:
While phonemic awareness also involves an understanding of the ways that sounds function in words, it deals with only one aspect of sound: the phoneme. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that holds meaning. Almost all words are made up of a number of phonemes blended together. Consider the word “ball”. It is made up of three phonemes: /b/ /aw/ /l/ . Each of its sounds affects the meaning. Take away the /b/ sound and replace it with /w/ and you have an entirely different word. Change the /aw/ for an /e/ sound and again the meaning changes (K12 Reader, 2014).
The recommended practices outlined in the K-3 Essential Instructional Practices are:
- Explicitly explaining, demonstrating, playing with sounds, and conducting engaged study of word by:
- Listening to and creating variations on books and songs with rhyming and alliteration
- Sorting pictures, objects, and written words by a sound or sounds (e.g. words with a short e sound versus words with a long e sound)
- Planning activities that involve segmenting sounds in words (e.g. Elkonin boxes, in which children move a token or letters into boxes, with one box for each sound in the word)
- Planning activities that involve blending sounds in words (e.g. "robot talk" in which the teacher says the soudns "fffff" "iiiii" "shhhh" and children say fish)
- Providing daily opportunities to write meaningful texts in which they listen for the sounds in words to estimate their spellings
Rhyming & Blending (Bullet 1)
Sound Boxes (Bullet 3)
|
Sorting Pictures by Sound (Bullet 2)
Blending Sounds (Bullet 4)
|
Spelling with Sounds (Bullet 5)
|