What is phonological awareness and how will this help my child?
Have you ever googled the best way to teach your child to read and been inundated with confusing terms like ‘phonological awareness’. It can all seem so confusing and that was me at the beginning of my journey, training to become a specialist dyslexia tutor. There were so many terms that my brain felt like it was going to explode.
In this blog post, my aim is to simplify it for you and help you to understand the most important phonological awareness skills we can lay for our children’s success in reading.
If you are a parent at home or a new teacher and feeling overwhelmed, I am hoping to demystify the age-old question, how can I teach my child to read?
Phonological Awareness and other terms you will come across:-
It is really important before we dive in to give you a quick overview of these terms so that you can refer back to it if you get confused. I often found it helpful to have somewhere I could quickly go to remind myself of all the different terms.
Phonemes
This word describes the smallest unit of sound in our language. A phoneme is a sound. In the word ‘cat’, there are 3 sounds (phonemes). There is the sound /c/, the sound /a/, and the sound /t/. In the word ‘ship’, there are also 3 sounds. There is the sound /sh/, the sound /i/, and the sound /p/. This has nothing to do with the number of letters as some sounds have more than one letter (grapheme).
Phonemic Awareness
This is the term that describes the awareness of these smallest units of sounds. I will talk more about this later on in this blog post.
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness is a BIG term that includes lots of skills needed to build a good foundation for reading. This includes ‘phonemic awareness’.
Syllables
I describe syllables as the beats of our language. Each syllable in English has a vowel sound in it which creates a kind of beat. You can count these syllables in many different ways. Clapping, stamping, or tapping are a few ways to count syllables. If you hold your hand under your chin you can also feel the movement of your jaw for each syllable.
Onset and Rime
This is the term used to describe the beginning sound of a word (onset) and the vowel sound plus any remaining consonants that come after, called the (rime).
Grapheme
A grapheme is a letter or group of letters that represents a sound. This is where we match the sounds we hear (phonemes) to the symbols we write for those sounds.
Phonics
Phonics is the word that describes the teaching of the written alphabetic code and how it relates to the sounds we hear. It is matching up the sound of our language to the symbols that we use to write those sounds down and in turn learn to read. For example, we can teach children that when they hear the sound /sh/ it is represented by an ‘s’ and an ‘h’ together.
Phonological Awareness
Science has proven that phonological awareness skills are a good predictor of reading success. If a child has poor skills in this area they will likely struggle to read and need some targeted intervention.
Phonological awareness is an ‘umbrella term’ that is used to describe all the processes that go into building a great foundation for reading and writing. Let’s break it down further.
Word Awareness
When a child enters school, they are generally armed with thousands of vocabulary words that they understand and can use in spoken language. It is here that they begin to become aware that sentences they use every day are made up of individual words.
For example: “I like cats.” This is a sentence made up of 3 separate words. This is the very beginning step of phonological awareness we call ‘word awareness’. It is the first step on the ladder to reading success, as you can see on my chart below.
Many activities can be done to increase this phonological awareness skill. Singing songs and clapping for each word or stomping like an animal. Tapping on musical instruments when they hear a sentence and using one beat per word.
You can pop out some numbers cards on the floor and say a simple sentence to your students like, “today is a beautiful day”, and get them to figure out how many words you spoke and jump on the correct number. This way you can informally assess which children may need more help with this.
Rhyme Awareness
The next step on the phonological awareness continuum is being aware that words rhyme. This often starts at pre-school with lots of fun nursery rhymes.
Once they have heard a lot of examples of rhymes they can progress to the next level of rhyme awareness. This is where children can give a rhyming word. It is important to practice this. You can do this by playing games like I spy something that rhymes with ‘me’ and your child can look at things and learn how to find the rhyming object – ‘tree’.
You can also give children lots of opportunities to hear words that don’t rhyme. For example, you might say, “I am going to say 3 words and I need you to pick the odd one out. The one that doesn’t rhyme.” This is quite difficult, but it is an important step in phonological awareness. It gives children a great understanding of how words are made up.
Syllable Awareness
The words in our language are made up of segments or chunks that we call syllables and children must be able to hear and count syllables. This can help them develop a strong phonological awareness. Being able to break words up into syllables can make reading longer words much easier.
Every syllable in our language must have a vowel sound. This means that our mouths move every time we say a syllable.
Syllable Activities
Try this for yourself. Say the word ‘electricity’ whilst holding your hand beneath your chin. Can you feel each movement? The word electricity has 5 syllables. This means there are 5 vowel sounds.
Try getting your student to clap the syllables or tap a drum or the table. Often I will start with compound words like ‘ice cream’, in which each syllable is a word by itself. Then once a child can hear the syllables I will progress to words like ‘pumpkin’, ‘teacher’ etc.
The next skill that children need to practice is deleting syllables. Ice cream without ‘cream’ says ‘ice’ or ‘pumpkin’ without ‘kin’ says ‘pump’. After this, I would teach children to manipulate syllables. This is when I ask a child to swap the ‘pump’ in ‘pumpkin’ to ‘nap’ to make the word ‘napkin’. I use manipulatives for this and it is all explained in a fun resource with games and activities that I have created for this purpose. You can find it here.
Onset and Rime
It is vital that children can hear that words have chunks or different parts. They have learnt about syllables and now it is time to look at what these syllables are made up of. For example, in the word ‘pumpkin’ the first syllable is made up of the onset ‘p’ and the rime ‘ump’.
If a child can recognize chunks in our language they will be able to build up a strong library of automatic sight words. It is easier for a child to learn that the rime ‘ump’ can make many words like ‘lump’, ‘stump’, ‘hump’, and ‘thump’ than it is for them to learn each word individually.
I like to play card games with my students. One of their favourites is my onset and rime games where they must read out the rime and then the words below it to place their card down. You can find my short vowel onset and rime card games here.
The next stage of phonological awareness can be done with your eyes closed. It is called ‘Phonemic Awareness’ and it is an extremely important skill that needs practice. This can help to remediate those with learning difficulties and pick up those who may struggle with reading.
It is important to add here however that research has now shown it to be even more effective if you practice the skill of phonemic awareness using written letters (graphemes) as well.
Phonemic Awareness
Many people get confused with the terms Phonological Awareness vs Phonemic Awareness. I hope that you can see after reading this blog post that Phonemic Awareness is 1 stage of the entire umbrella term of phonological awareness.
There are a few stages in this phonemic awareness process.
Phoneme Isolation
Firstly a child must be able to hear that words are made up of sounds. These sounds as I mentioned before are called phonemes. A child must be able to hear that ‘mat’ and ‘man’ both start with the sound (phoneme), /m/. This means that they have been able to isolate that single sound /m/ from the other two sounds in the word. I always start with beginning sounds, then move to ending sounds, and finally the most difficult of all, medial sounds.
Phoneme Blending
This phonemic awareness skill involves a child being able to hear sounds and blend them together to make a word. For example, I might say the sounds /b/ /a/ /t/ and ask the child what the word would be if they were blended together. There are many activities you can do to practice this. Using hand motions is a great way to show children how to hear each sound in the word. There are many videos and resources on the internet that can supplement your teaching in this area. Here is a really helpful video from ‘Heggerty’ that explains the hand motions they use in their lessons. Watch it here
Phoneme Segmenting
This is the opposite of blending. This is when you say the whole word and get your student to stretch the word out into its phonemes. For example, the word ‘shop’ has 3 sounds, /sh/, /o/, and /p/. I often use different objects or tokens for this exercise and get students to touch each object for each sound. I have used Lego pieces, playdough or cut-up felt squares. Multi-sensory learning is always more engaging for students.
Manipulating Phonemes
Once a child can isolate, blend, and segment it is time to introduce them to being able to manipulate sounds. A fluent reader will be able to hear that if I change the /m/ in ‘milk’ to /s/, the word becomes ‘silk’. The progression of skills would start at changing the first sound, the end sound and finally being able to swap out the medial vowel sounds. If there were phonological awareness goals this would be one of the greatest goals to achieve. Being able to hear that if I change the /o/ to /a/ in ‘rock’, the word becomes ‘rack’.
My Phonemic Awareness Activity Resource has done all the hard work for you with all the word lists you need to practice this skill. Have a look here.
So the big question I hear a lot is…
What is the difference between Phonological Awareness and Phonics?
Take a look at this visual below and you will see that Phonics is what we teach after building all the foundational skills of Phonological Awareness.
If a child has a good foundation in Phonological Awareness they are much more likely to succeed when we begin to introduce them to the LETTERS that represent these SOUNDS.
You can download a copy of this visual for free by clicking on it!
I hope this has been helpful for you in your mission to help children learn to read. If you are a parent at home, I hope you have found some understanding and some resources to start you on your way with your child.
If your child is struggling I would love for you to download my free guide to show you what you can do to help them and the important things you need to consider on the journey to get your child reading well. Grab it below.
Happy Teaching
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