The most important things to remember when teaching phonemic awareness

Hello! This is Anna Geiger from The Measured Mom, and this is the third in a series of short, to-the-point episodes that are counting down to the release of my book, "Reach All Readers" on July 23rd, 2024. Today I'm sharing the most important things to remember when teaching phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the conscious awareness of individual units of sound in spoken words, and these units of sound are called phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound within a spoken word that can distinguish one word from another.

The first important thing to remember is that of all the phonological awareness skills, phonemic awareness is by far the most important. While you may choose to teach other skills like rhyming, syllable counting, and onset-rime, there's no reason to delay the teaching of phonemic awareness. You don't need to teach those other skills before phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness should be taught beginning in preschool.

The next thing to remember is that when doing phonemic awareness tasks, start with phoneme isolation, that's helping kids hear the initial, final, and medial sounds in words, in that order. Then move on to blending phonemes into words and segmenting words into phonemes. Blending is important for decoding and segmenting is important for spelling.

The third thing to remember is that you should incorporate letters into your phonemic awareness instruction as soon as you are able. Oral activities are useful before students know letter-sound correspondences, and they continue to be useful as transition activities and as quick phonics lesson warm-ups, but phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when letters are incorporated because it helps students learn the alphabetic principle that symbols represent units of sound.

Finally, phonemic awareness instruction is a means rather than an end. Phonemic awareness is not meaningful in and of itself; it only matters in the context of reading instruction, and that's why it's so important to incorporate letters into phonemic awareness instruction whenever possible. That's not turning phonemic awareness into phonics; it's adding phonics.

Phonemic awareness is chapter four in my book, "Reach All Readers," and within that chapter, I give specific lesson routines that will help you make the most of your phonemic awareness instruction. You can get Reach All Readers wherever books are sold, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Bookshop, BAM! or ThriftBooks. Thanks so much for considering, and I'll talk to you next time!

That's all for this episode of Triple R Teaching. For more educational resources, visit Anna at her home base, themeasuredmom.com, and join our teaching community. We look forward to helping you reflect, refine and recharge on the next episode of Triple R Teaching.