A Simple Guide to Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic Awareness is the foundation for reading. It is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words. These skills need to be developed before a child can learn to sound out and blend words.

It is important to understand that these skills can not be rushed. These oral language skills are abilities that a child acquires when they are developmentally ready. If your child is struggling with these activities, continue working with them, but never rush them to move on to the next step until they are ready. Teaching a child to read will be a much easier task once these skills are developed.

The first step is an awareness of words in our spoken language. An example of this task would be asking a child to separate the words in a sentence by clapping for each word as he/she repeats the sentence. A fun game, as well as some sample sentences, you can play with your class or child can be found at

words in sentences

After being able to separate words in sentences, we need to work on parts of a word. The ability to separate words into syllables can sometimes be confusing for children if you are working on words in a sentence at the same time. Once the parts of a sentence have been understood, you do not need to keep working on this. Focus your efforts on syllables. Activities can be found at

syllable activities

Rhyming is a necessary part of phonemic awareness. Many children learn to have an ear for rhyming early in life. For some, it may take a little more practice with some exercises and activities. There are many activities you can do to begin working on this skill. A great place to start would be with nursery rhymes. These childhood treasures are greatly undervalued in our society today. Children that are familiar with nursery rhymes will typically have few problems with rhyming. Other rhyming ideas are: *Making up silly sentences with your child/students (Ex: The cat saw a rat on the mat.). *Call out a word and try to come up with as many words as possible. These words can be real or made up words.

Click here to find another great phonemic awareness activity to work on rhyming.

rhyming activities

After a beginning reader is able to hear the syllables in 2,3, and 4 syllable words, begin working on individual sounds in words. Always start with the first sound. Activities for working on the initial sound may be found at

initial sound activities

The initial sound of a word is the easiest sound to hear. After this skill is mastered, begin to practice finding the final sound. It is best to use short words to begin this skill of phonemic awareness. The same activities you use to practice hearing the initial sound can easily be altered to work on the final sound.

You guessed it! After a student masters finding the initial sound and the final sound in words, it is time to start developing the skill of identifying the middle sounds in words. It is important to begin with words that have 3 sounds in them, such as 'cat' and 'part'. This skill may take a little longer to master, but don't give up - the practice WILL pay off big dividends later.

Now it is time to start putting several of these skills together. To read, a child has to understand that words consist of several different sounds that are put together to make words. These sounds can also be rearranged to make new words. Once this skill is developed, your child is on his way to becoming a reader. The goal is for the child to be able to hear each individual sound in a word. You can find more specific directions and individual exercises by clicking on the link below.

phoneme segmentation

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