Phonemic Awareness and Learning to Read

Jennifer Partrick
Dec 14, 2009

There is no doubt that phonemic awareness is critical to learning to read. The inability to hear and manipulate sounds will negatively impact an individual learning to read. As teachers, we need to think about how we approach teaching phonemic awareness. When we ask students to tell us the first sound they hear in a word we need to be sure that our students truly understand what we are asking them. First, do the students understand concept of sound and ordinal numbers. If they do not have an understanding of either of those things then they will be unable to complete the task. If they cannot complete the task does that mean that they do not hear the sounds or that they do not understand what is being asked of them?

In order to be sure that students do understand concepts of sound and placement of sound, consider playing the following game before moving to phonemic awareness skills. For the purpose of this article the sounds that I will use to explain the game is clapping, snapping, and stomping. Explain to your students that you are going to do something and their job is to tell you what they heard. Put your back to your students and clap your hands. Turn around and ask your students what they heard. Explain that they heard you clapping. They heard the sound of clapping. Repeat this game with stomping and snapping and each time you explain that they heard the sound of you clapping, snapping, and stomping. You are making sure that they understand the concept of sound here.

The next step is ordinal numbers. A teacher whom I work with shared how she taught ordinal numbers. She took a picture of her students racing as they crossed the finish line. She then talked with them about who came first, second, third, etc. Model for your students clapping and then stomping and explain that the first thing you did was clap and the last thing you did was stomp. Again, back to your students and stomp and snap. Have students tell you what they heard first and last. Repeat this game making sure that your students can articulate what sounds they heard first and last.

At this point, you know that your students understand the concept of sound, first and last. Now you are ready to move to words. Before you ask your students to isolate the sounds they hear in words model first what the expectation is. When working with initial sound, be sure to choose words that have a distinct initial sound. Some sounds are easier to hear than others. After modeling, then move to having your students work with sounds they hear in words.

Phonemic awareness is such a vital part of reading that teachers need to be sure that they do whatever they can to help students play with and manipulate sounds. However, we need to be sure that our students understand the task we are asking them to do.

For more information see Learning to Read K-2.