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The ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds that make up words, known as phonemic awareness, is crucial for children before they begin reading. Phonemic awareness involves several skills, including isolation, blending, segmenting, addition, deletion, and substitution of sounds in words.
For instance, the word "FISH" consists of three phonemes: F, I, and SH. Isolation involves identifying beginning, middle, and end sounds in a word. Blending requires putting letter sounds together to form a word. Segmenting is recognizing distinct phonemes within a word. Addition creates new words by adding sounds; for example, adding /s/ to "CAT" forms "CATS." Deletion involves removing a sound to create a new word; removing /c/ from "CAT" results in "AT." Substitution changes one sound in a word to form another; changing C in "CAT" to B makes it "BAT."
Activities suggested for building phonemic awareness include playing word games where children guess words ending with specific sounds or find rhyming words. Another activity is playing I Spy with sounds instead of objects. The Say it and Move it activity uses items like coins or blocks moved into Elkonin boxes while sounding out each part of a word.
Resources from KCPL such as Tumblebooks offer digital storytimes and games like “complete the word” that enhance phonemic awareness. Teachables provides worksheets on this topic.
Lisa Clark emphasizes reading books with rhyming and alliteration as beneficial for developing these skills. More information can be found on KCPL’s Early Literacy page.
