What is Phonological Awareness?
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that refers to the conscious awareness of all the speech sounds in our English language, including word boundaries, stress patterns, syllables, onset-rime, and phonemes. When teaching reading, we focus a lot on phonemic awareness which falls under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Phonemic awareness is more specific, and refers to the conscious awareness of the phonemes, the smallest units of speech, in words.
Phonemic awareness is where we get the most bang for our buck since a student’s ability to segment and blend individual sounds in spoken words is highly predictive of their future reading success or failure. As educators, we want to get students to the point where they are manipulating the phonemes in spoken words, with and without the actual letters. This should start happening in kindergarten and continues into fourth grade.
The rest of this blog post is organized in two ways:
First, I will outline a sequence of phonological awareness activities, moving from early to basic to advanced. This sequence should suggest a general pathway for helping students develop phonological awareness but is not meant to be a rigid step-by-step sequence.
Second, I will suggest some hands-on ways to practice phonological awareness that can be used to help with student engagement and differentiated support. In addition to my suggestions, you will often find amazing and clever ideas across social media. It’s important to understand the sequence of phonological skills students need as you pick from all the amazing ideas for practice you may find from other educators.
Early Phonological Awareness Activities
Preschool-Beginning Kindergarten (Ages 4-5)
1. Read books with rhyming patterns and alliteration.
2. Play with rhyming words.
a. Find and make up words that rhyme.
b. Choose which words rhyme out of three choices.
3. Play with alliteration.
4. Play with syllables.
a. Blend syllables by saying two separate syllables and then blending them together.
b. Delete syllables by deleting one part of a compound word.
c. Count the number of syllables in a word.
5. Find words that start with the same sound.
6. Break words apart into onset and rime.
Basic Phonological Awareness Activities
Kindergarten-First Grade (Ages 5-6)
1. Say onset and rime and blend into whole word.
2. Identify the first sound in words.
3. Break 1-syllable words apart into their sounds.
4. Find words that end with the same sound.
5. Blend phonemes together into whole words.
6. Substitute, or change, the sound at the beginning or end of a word.
7. Substitute the middle vowel sound in a word.
8. Use manipulatives to track the sounds you are changing in words.
Advanced Phonological Awareness Activities
Second Grade – Fourth Grade (Ages 7-9)
1. Blend longer, multisyllabic words together.
2. Use manipulatives to make sound chains where you change sounds one at a time in words to make new words.
3. Say two words where only one sound is different and identify what sound is different.
4. Delete syllables and sounds from multisyllabic words in all positions (beginning, middle, and end).
5. Reverse the sounds in a word.
6. Substitute or delete whole syllables or affixes in a word.
7. Use Pig Latin.
But make it hands-on!
The sequence of phonological skills listed above gives you an idea of how to move through different phonological tasks that become increasingly complex. Once you know the skills to focus on, you can plan for engaging, fun ways to practice these skills with students. This is one way that social media can be an amazing resource. Scrolling Instagram and searching on Pinterest can leave you with an almost overwhelming number of choices. Pull those choices in when you need them while staying focused on the skill you’re teaching.
Here are some general hands-on suggestions that I love to use in my own classroom.
Colored felt or card stock squares
Target Dollar spot erasers
Use letter magnets or tiles*
*You will often hear that phonological awareness tasks are only done with oral language and should be completed without letters. While there is truth to this, there is also growing research to support using letters with phonemic awareness tasks once students know their letters and letter sounds. To hear more about this, I’d recommend listening to The Teaching, Reading, and Learning Podcast episode with Linnea Ehri.
References:
Moats, L. C., & Tolman, C. A. (2019). LETRS (3rd ed., Vol. 1). Voyager Sopris.
