Feature of the Month: Beyond the ABCs...What is Phonological Awareness?

It’s back to school time for many students.  During this exciting time, parents often want to make sure they are giving children all the tools needed to be successful in the classroom.  Do you know what is the single most important factor in reading success?  It’s a child’s phonological awareness skills.  The ability to recognize that there are sounds in words and that these sounds can be talked about, thought about, and manipulated are the key components of phonological awareness.  These core skills are directly related to a child’s reading and spelling abilities.  Children who have speech and language delays are at risk for developing problems with phonological awareness skills and reading. 

Phonological awareness skills can be broken into the following categories in order from easiest to more difficult skills:

• Preparatory activities-  these focus on introducing the art of good listening skills
• Rhyming activities- recognizing and producing rhyming words
• Sound awareness activities- identifying sounds that are in initial, medial, and final positions of words

Segmenting and blending activities- Segmenting is counting the number of words in a sentence, number of syllables in words, and then number of sounds in a word.  Blending is being able to hear individual sounds and then blend them into a word (e.g., /b/…/.a/…./t/ “What’s the word?”) 

Manipulation activities- this is the highest skill level.  These skills include deleting syllables and sounds in words, substituting syllables and sounds in words, and reversing syllables and sounds in words.  For example, ask the child to say “man” then say it again but change the “m” to a “p” sound. 

These essential skills develop at different ages for children.  The charts below outline the ages of skill development.  Depending on what level of development your child is at, there are many activities you can do to help him develop these essential pre-reading skills. 

Preparatory Activities- Prepare your child to be a good listener.  Listen to different sounds throughout the day and talk about what you hear (e.g., “I hear barking, that’s a dog, or “I hear a siren, that’s a fire truck”).  Play listening games such as “Simon Says” and “Mother May I?” 

Rhyming activities- Have your child listen to and recite nursery rhymes and finger plays.  Talk about how rhyming words sound the same.  Read stories with lots of rhymes such as “Brown Bear, Brown Bear,” and Dr. Seuss books.  Sing lots of songs and TV jingles. 

Sound awareness activities- Introduce the sounds that letters make.  Once children are familiar with all the sounds, say a word and ask your child what sound is at the beginning of the word.  Write the word and then ask them to think of other words that start with that sound.   Another activity is to use paper “mailboxes” with letters printed on the front of each box.  Give children pictures that begin with the sounds made by the letters written on the boxes.  Have the child “mail” the letter by putting in the box with the same initial sound.  Start with only two boxes and gradually add more letters.

Segmenting and blending activities- Help your child become aware that sentences are made of words.  Have the child clap his hands or jump for the number of words in a sentence or for the number of syllables in a word.  After he has mastered counting the number of words in sentences and syllables in words, move on to a more difficult task, counting the number of sounds in a single word.  For blending, start with compound words, think of a two syllable word and say each syllable with a pause in between (e.g., “snow     man” and then ask your child what the “mystery” word is and see if they can say “snowman.” )  After they can blend words with lots of syllables, have them blend sounds in words (e.g. say each sound while pausing in between)  For example, “b ….a…t” and  have them guess what the word is. 

Manipulation activities- These activities are the most difficult, and are usually very difficult for children under the age of five years.  Start with compound words and then have the child leave off a syllable.  For example, have him say “snowman” then “say it again but don’t say snow.”  Once they are good at this, move to deleting sounds in words (e.g., “say card,”  then “say it again but leave off the /d/” and the child responds “car.”)  For manipulating sounds, using color blocks, candy, or cereal pieces works well.  Have each color represent a different sound in a word.  For example, the word “cat” would have three different color candy pieces.  Take the /k/ candy piece and replace it with a new color and tell the child “let’s change the /k/ to a /m/” and make a new word.  Have the child guess the new word.  It’s important to say the sounds that the letters make and NOT the letter names. 

If you have concerns about your child’s phonological awareness skills, give us a call for more information on how we can help.  Below are additional resources for developing phonological awareness skills in children.

Developmental charts:

Three and four year olds:

• Show interest in books
• Show interest in print on signs and labels
• Recognize some signs and labels
• Recognize some books by their covers
• Know titles of some books
• Look at print and pictures in books
• Know that the print is what you read
• Know to read from front to back and left to right
• Begin to appreciate and repeat rhymes
• Begin to count syllables (50% of children by age four)
• Pay attention to repeated sounds in rhymes (e.g., “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater”)
• Segment onsets and rimes but not phonemes
• Know alphabet letters have names
• Know some letter names and can identify 10 letters, especially those in their own names
• Experiment with writing by scribbling and writing strings of letters, or letter-like and number-like forms
• Make drawings, scribbles, and letters to make notes and stories
• String letters randomly without regard for sound-letter correspondences
• May write left to right, right to left, or up, down, and backwards
• Begin to use invented or creative spellings with initial consonants

 

Kindergarteners:

• Know the parts of a book and their functions
• Begin to track print when listening to a familiar story
• Begin to “read” graphic designs by attending to first and last letters and their sounds
• May read a few short regularly spelled words and may know some sight words
• Know some book titles and authors
• Read their own names and some classmates’ names
• Recognize word family patterns
• Demonstrate phonemic awareness for:

- Rhyming (given a word, can produce a rhyming word)
- Clapping/counting syllables (90% of children by age five)
- Substituting sounds
- Blending phonemes (given sounds, can blend them into a word)
- Counting phonemes (50% of children by age five)
- Manipulating letters to make new words (can change cat to hat )

• Separate onsets and rimes with singleton initial consonants
• Attend to word beginnings and endings (e.g., c-at )
• Begin to figure out the alphabetic system; understand that letter sequences of letters (graphemes) represent sound sequences (phonemes)
• Know some letter-sound associations
• Know names and shapes of alphabet letters; recognize and name all uppercase and lowercase letters
• Understand that spoken words consist of sequences of phonemes
• Tell which of three words is different (e.g., sit, sit, suit )
• Tell which of three words shares a common sound (e.g., dog, doll, pen)
• Write many uppercase and lowercase letters
• Use phonemic awareness and letter knowledge to spell (invented or creative spelling)
• Know some conventionally spelled words
• Write their own names and first names of some friends or classmates
• Write most letters and some words from dictation

 

First Graders:

• Make a transition from emergent to “real” reading
• Read regularly spelled words accurately
• Read somewhat automatically
• Recognize basic word families and patterns
• Accurately decode orthographically regular, one-syllable words and nonsense words
• Use knowledge of letter-sound correspondence to sound out unknown words
• Recognize common irregularly spelled words by sight (e.g., said, two)
• Recognize 50 high frequency words automatically
• Count the number of syllables in a word
• Count phonemes (70% of children by age six)
• Divide words by onset and rime
• Blend and segment sounds in one-syllable words
• Manipulate sounds/letters in words (substitute, delete, and reverse)
• Match initial consonants
• Identify all letter names and shapes
• Know basic letter-sound correspondences
• Learn the alphabetic code in school
• Attend to and use letter-sound relations to spell
• Use knowledge of consonants, short vowels, and silent -e in spelling
• Use conventional spelling for simple regularly spelled words
• Use phonetic spelling to invented spellings when necessary
• Begin to look for word parts and affixes
• Spell familiar and high frequency words

 

*Information adapted from The Source for Phonological Awareness ( 2003)