Phonemic Awareness at your Fingertips

Phonological and phonemic awareness is such an important foundation for reading, writing, and spelling. Phonemic awareness skills are critical to reading success, but they are sometimes overlooked.

When I meet with my students in small group during that first couple weeks of school, I like to assess their phonemic awareness skills to see which students are going to need additional practice in this area. Then, I can work with these students to build these important skills.

I absolutely love using fun manipulatives for practicing phonemic awareness. We use Slinkys, magnetic wands, game chips, blocks, etc. to keep it hands on. The important thing to remember is that phonemic awareness is auditory and does not involve print. You are working on phonics skills if you are discussing letters and using writing words. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in words.

I found this article on at www.dyslexia-reading-well.com so interesting when it discussed phonemic awareness. “According to Julian Elliott and Elena Grigorenko in their 2014 book The Dyslexia Debate, the phonological deficit hypothesis has been the dominant cognitive explanation of dyslexia for over four decades. According to this hypothesis, “children with dyslexia are hindered by faulty representation of speech sounds, which leads to problems involving the precise processing of spoken words.”

I really wanted to make sure that I hit these crucial skills this year, especially for my beginning readers. I created this Phonemic Awareness at your Fingertips packet to ensure that my students will have a strong foundation with all of the phonemic awareness skills.

This packet includes pre and post assessments as well as student checklists for each of the phonemic awareness skills (sentence segmentation, rhyming, alliteration, syllables, onset & rime, phoneme blending, phoneme segmentation, phoneme deletion, and phoneme substitution).