What in the world is phonemic awareness anyway?
Do you think of phonemic awareness as baby skills? Or skills that are too easy for your students, who REALLY need to focus on real reading skills like phonics?
So many schools put their main focus on phonics and completely ignore phonemic awareness skills…but what if I told you that these skills really DO make a big impact on student learning? What if I told you a shocking number of students come in to schools without strong phonemic awareness skills and it impacts their entire educational career???
Even 4th graders need phonemic awareness skills.
I had a teacher ask me a few weeks ago… How the heck am I supposed to help these kids??? She was talking about kids who have been struggling with phonics since they were in first grade (she’s a 4th grade teacher). It seems like they haven’t made any progress, despite years of intervention. These kids are smart, they pick up on things in class. But phonics? Not working.
After talking about it for a while, I asked her to do a quick screener for me. I sent her a phonemic screener. She saw it and said “This is way too baby, why are you giving me this??”
Well, after she made fun of me for wasting her time and to prove me wrong….she did the screener. My friend lost her mind at how poorly her students did on these “baby skills”.
Turns out, all this time the interventions were focused on phonics, but her students had the worst time trying to blend or segment sounds in words. They literally couldn’t hear the individual sounds in the words. THAT’s why they weren’t making any progress in phonics.
All of a sudden it clicked for both of us. We may think that we are really delving into the most basic skills when we focus on phonics. Reading doesn’t start at letters and their sounds. Reading starts with phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness is….
Phonemic awareness is a smaller piece of phonological awareness. We will talk more about phonological awareness in future posts, so stay tuned in!
Phonemic awareness skills focus on a student’s ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in a word. The fancy term for sounds in words is “phonemes”.
These skills are vitally important because they directly relate to a student’s ability to hear the individual sounds in words. Being able to here the phonemes in words is the foundation for phonics. Those students who just seem to not “get” phonics often have poor phonemic awareness skills.
Why do we skip over phonemic awareness?
There are several reasons teachers skip past these skills:
- Phonemic awareness skills seem like “baby” skills.
- We see phonics as the “real” work in teaching reading.
- Many teachers think that phonics is the most basic skill in reading.
- There is a lot of pressure to make big gains quickly for struggling learners.
- There is a misunderstanding about the impact that poor phonemic awareness skills may have on student learning.
Does phonemic awareness really matter?
YES!
I hinted at it earlier, but yes, phonemic awareness skills do directly relate to much more advanced skills. Skills such as decoding, understanding word families, and writing are impacted.
I was speaking to an SLP a few days ago about students who struggle with articulation. We realized that phonemic awareness can also use support students in these areas. Being able to break down and put together the phonemes in a word helps students learn and use the sounds they need to articulate.
Students who are struggling with phonics may benefit from phonemic practice. Check those phonemic awareness skills, that’s usually the root cause of struggles with phonics.
Some students struggling with word families, or sounding out words may not hear the phonemes in the words.
We will talk more about phonological awareness later on, but students who skip words when writing sentences, could could have a phonological awareness issue. We will get there in future posts.
Ok, so phonemic awareness is important….what do I do?
There are lots of diagnostic assessments available free from google. Use one of these screeners to determine if phonemic skills are the main issue.
This screener will tell you what specific phonemic awareness skill to focus on.
Over the next 4 weeks, I will be posting about the specific phonemic awareness skills that students need. Check out the posts for specific ideas to teach and progress monitor those skills!
