Skill Spotlight: Phonemic Awareness

• Subject: Wellness

• Grade: English Language Arts (ELA)

What is my child learning?

A major focus in early kindergarten is phonemic awareness, or the ability to recognize and produce sounds in spoken language. A phoneme is the smallest "bite" of sound in a word. For example, the word bat is made up of three phonemes: /b/ /a/ /t/. The word breath is made up of four: /b/ /r/ /e/ /th/. Note that the number of phonemes in a word is not the same as the number of letters. Some letters work together as a team to make a single sound, such as the 'ea' in breath making the /e/ (short e) sound together. Phonemic awareness is a key foundational reading skill. Before beginning readers can "sound out" words to read them, they must first recognize that language is made up of individual sounds and become adept at recognizing and manipulating those sounds. Note that phonemic awareness activities focus only on the sounds. Individual sounds are not yet linked to a specific written letter or letter combination. In this activity, kids specifically focus on substituting phonemes, or individual sounds in simple words. 

📅 Coming tomorrow

This week’s activity is called “Word Chains.” It’s an engaging activity that helps children build reading and phonemic awareness skills they’ll use in this year and beyond. Look for it in your text tomorrow!