Phonics/Phonemic

Awareness

By the K-3 grade span

Phonics vs. Phonemic
Awareness
 Phonics
 Involves teaching students how to connect the sounds of
spoken English with letters or groups of letters. (c, k, ck
spellings)


 Phonemic Awareness
 Is the skill that is needed to recognize that a spoken word consist
of a sequence of individual sounds (bun, run, sun, fun)


 Similarity
 Both phonics and phonemic awareness sets the foundation for
reading and writing.

Research
 Research indicates that a child who is taught systematic
phonemic awareness will learn how to notice, think about and
manipulate sounds in spoken language.

 The following activities are ways to build phonemic awareness:

 1. Phoneme isolation
 2. Phoneme identity
 3. Phoneme categorization
 4. Phoneme blending
 5. Phoneme segmentation
 6. Phoneme deletion
 7. Phoneme addition
 8. Phoneme substitution




Phoneme isolation
 Children recognize individual sounds in a
word
 In kindergarten children are taught to isolate
the beginning and end sound of words.


/b/ in the word bus

/t/ in the word cat


Blending
 Children listen to a sequence of separately
spoken phonemes and then combine the
phonemes to form a word.

 m
 m a
 m a n
Deletion/Addition/Subtracti
on
 Phoneme deletion- children recognize the word
that remains when a phoneme is removed from
another word.
 Ex. – treason without the /t/ is reason.
 Phoneme addition- Children make a new word by
adding a phoneme to an existing word.
 Ex.- if you add /b/ to the beginning of rake what is
the new word? brake.
 Phoneme substitution- Children substitute one
phoneme for another to make a new word.
 Ex.- the word is run. Change the /n/ to /g/. What’s
the new word? rug



Examples of games to enhance
phonemic awareness
instruction.
Phonics Instruction
According to research-Systematic and explicit


phonics instruction makes a bigger contribution to

children’s growth in reading than non-systematic
instruction.


Examples of phonics instruction:



 Embedded phonics
 Sight word recognition
 Analytic based phonics (use part of the word to
decode and read words they don’t know)




Embedded
Phonics/Decodables
 Children are taught letter-sound
relationships during the reading of
connected text.

 Example: Open Court Decodables


Sight Words
 Words recognized immediately by the reader
without he or she having to go through the
process of decoding them.


 Another name for sight words is High

Frequency Words.



Analogy-based phonics
 Children are taught to use parts of words
they have already learned to read and
decode words they don’t know.

 Example:

 Screen and green