Reading Foundations

Phonemic awareness, phonological awareness, and phonics are all essential foundations of reading. Phonemic awareness instruction improves phonics skills and phonics skills improve phonological awareness. All these skills work together to create fluent, comprehensive readers. Therefore, practice and explicit instruction are essential.

Phonemic awareness is the most essential level of phonological awareness. Your child must have these skills to support literacy development. In short, phonemic awareness focuses on how the language sounds and what it means. These skills are acquired through speaking and listening to letter sounds and spoken language. They involve being able to recognize, identify, and manipulate phonemes or letter sounds in spoken words. Therefore, we must teach children that spoken words can be broken down into phenomes or individual sounds. Some ways to support phonemic awareness at home include, substituting and deleting parts of words, playing word rhyming games, and saying tongue twisters. When substituting or deleting parts of words start simple (as all instructions should). Think of the word hat... If we substitute the onset (the initial consonant /h/) for a different letter, what other words can we get (cat, hat, fat, bat, mat, rat)? Rhyming is a skill that identifies familiar-sounding words that have different onsets, but the same rimes (endings). Lastly, tongue twisters support repetitive speech sound exploration. Phonemic awareness skills can also be improved through alphabetic awareness or understanding that the letters of the alphabet make certain sounds and are dictated by written symbols. The importance of phonemic awareness is to isolate and recognize individual letter sounds in spoken words.

Phonological awareness expands on the principles of phonemic awareness and breaks down words into parts rather than individual sounds. Phonological awareness focuses a lot on the onsets and rimes of words, onsets being the consonants and rimes being what immediately follows them. The most essential phonological skills to build are blending and segmenting words or combining sounds to put a word together and breaking the word down into chunks of sounds. These skills are once again acquired through speaking and listening. In this area, there are four levels: word level (speaking), syllable (number of parts or chunks in a word), intrasyllabic (the sounds within a syllable), and phoneme level. Ways to support phonological awareness at home include sounding out and counting syllables in words. When children break a word down into syllables, they are segmenting that word. Word blending can be supported by breaking a word down into syllables and having a child combine those syllables into a whole word. Other strategies to support phonological awareness are, identifying words that start with the same letters, isolating words that begin with a different letter, and deleting parts of a word to get a different word. While similar to phonemic awareness, phonological awareness focuses on identifying different parts or chunks of words rather than the individual sounds.

Phonics requires phonemic and phonological awareness because this is beginning reading! Meaning printed/written words (graphemes) are incorporated into instruction. In short, they sound out written words. Phonemic awareness practices are considered phonics instruction if print is involved. Phonics applies phonemic and phonological awareness to a code or grapheme inside of words. The code is dictated by letter-sound correspondence which states that the way that words are written determines the way it sounds. Therefore, phonics instruction should be explicitly taught and progress into more difficult word families based on the types of codes presented that allow children to break down and decode words to understand their meanings. Ways to support phonics instruction at home include practicing and identifying sight words, spelling by sound, blending or sounding out common printed words, and practicing reading decodable text. Sight words also increase in complexity as children progress in school but on a basic level include words like you, me, I, and, it, we, to, and the. Spelling by sound involves saying and sounding out a word to identify and write it, remember that young children spell phonetically, and it is normal for the words to be written incorrectly but sound approximately correct when spoken. Decodable texts are simple stories that use repetitive speech that has been practiced in phonics instruction including sight words, these can easily be made or found online. Strong decoding and encoding skills become muscle memory and allow children to do it automatically, creating fluent readers and increasing reading comprehension.

Additional Resources:

Reading Rockets: https://www.readingrockets.org/literacy-home/reading-101-guide-parents/your-kindergartner/phonological-and-phonemic-awarness

• Describes strategies to support phonological and phonemic awareness at home.

https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/phonics-and-decoding/articles/phonics-instruction-basics

• All about effective phonics instruction to support early reading and literacy development.

• Their website has other useful information about teaching children how to read.

National Center Improving Literacy: https://improvingliteracy.org/kit/phonological-phonemic-awareness/index.html

• Provides tutorials, materials, and information for parents and educators to support phonemic and phonological awareness.

  
  

Scholastic: https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-reading/reading-resources/developing-reading-skills/teach-phonics-home.html

• Offers support strategies for teaching phonics at home and provides book lists to support phonics instruction.

Hooked on Phonics: Your Child Will Learn To Read, Guaranteed | Hooked On Phonics

• Phonics framework to teach reading (monthly cost).