Most people know about phonics, and what it is; however, far fewer people know what phonemic awareness is. In short, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and work with the phonemes. For example, /d/, /o/, and /g/, are the individual sounds of the word "dog". Please note, the letters enclosed in the slashes denotes the sound of the letter, and not the name of the letter. Phonemes are the smallest units of individual sounds that form a word.
Phonemic awareness is not something you're born with, and it is an ability that's gained through repeated exposure to listening, speaking, and reading. As parents, there are many different strategies you can use to help your children develop phonemic awareness such as playing simple word segmentation or oral blending games.
Like most parents, Jim Yang from Children Learning Reading and his wife read bedtime stories before they put their children to sleep, and one of the best strategies that they like to use to teach phonemic awareness to their children, is to mix in word segmenting and oral blending when they read bedtime stories for their kids. This is an exceptional method, because it doesn't take any extra time or effort, since reading bedtime stories is something you already do. So, here's how to go about it.
Let's say that you're reading a nursery rhyme "Jack and Jill":
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
To fetch a pail of water.
Jack fell down and broke his crown
And Jill came tumbling after.
Instead of reading each word straight through the rhyme, you can
randomly mix in oral blending on various words in the rhyme. Please
note: instead of using slashes "/" to denote phonemes, we'll simply use
hyphens to make it easier to read. So, let's assume that your child is
very young, perhaps 2, 3, or 4 years old, and you want to start helping
them develop some phonemic awareness. You can read Jack and Jill like
so:
J-ack and J-ill went up the h-ill
To fetch a p-ail of water.
J-ack fell down and broke his crown
And J-ill came tumbling after.
To fetch a p-ail of water.
J-ack fell down and broke his crown
And J-ill came tumbling after.
As you can see, when you read the rhyme, you simply make an effort to
separate several of the first letters sounds from the words, such as /J/
from "ack", and /J/ from "ill". As your child begins to grasp the
concept of individual sounds making up words, you can slowly increase
the difficulty by breaking down each word further. For example:
Jack
J-ack
J-a-ck
J-ack
J-a-ck
Repeated exposure of this type of word segmenting and oral blending will
slowly help your child develop a sense and an understanding that each
word is made up of individual sounds - in other words, you are teaching
phonemic awareness to your children during bedtime stories without them
even knowing that they are being taught to!