Explicit teaching of Phonemic Awareness

It’s widely recognised that phonemic awareness training is effective for assisting children who may be at risk for reading disability (Rehfeld et al., 2022). Preschool children can begin to appreciate the rhythm and rhyme of the English language. When we ask children to clap beats in their name or a word, they are tuning in to the rhythm of our spoken language and identifying syllables. Being able to identify syllables is an important strategy for both later reading and spelling. These skills can be taught through reading high quality children’s literature and oral word play rhyming games.

When children become aware of how words rhyme, they are  demonstrating phonological awareness. If they can recognise and produce patterns such as man, pan, can, ran they are deleting the first phoneme (onset) in the syllable and replacing it with another. Rhyming skills can be helped along by sharing high quality rhyming picture story books. Enjoying rhyming stories and games provides children with an opportunity to become aware that words do not just represent meanings, but they are also patterns of sound that can be manipulated. This awareness is an essential first step to the understanding of the alphabetic principle.

Phonological awareness activities that focus on the larger units of sound, such as syllables and onset-rime segmentation are usually easier for children than the more complex skills of segmenting, blending, deleting and manipulating sounds.