Phonemic awareness is critical to your child’s learning — especially when learning to read. When your child has phonemic awareness, they are able to learn to read easier.
Here at Right Steps Education, we have a Phonemic Awareness Program designed to make learning early literacy skills fun for your child.
Read on to learn more about phonemic awareness and how our program can benefit your child.
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to head and identify the smallest mental units of sound, known as phonemes. A simpler way to put it would be “sounding out” words.
For example, you being able to separate the word dog into three distinct sounds would demonstrate phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness is taught after a child gains phonological awareness, or the ability to divide words into parts or syllables.
There are three parts to phonemic awareness:
- Blending
- Splitting
- Substituting
Blending
Blending is the ability to take several phonemes and combine them into one word. For example, blending the D, O, and G sounds to make the word dog.
Children that struggle with reading usually have trouble blending phonemes.
Splitting
After blending comes splitting, which involves breaking a word down into its phonemes. In the case of the word “dog”, you’d break it down into the D, O, and G sounds.
Learning how to split words makes it easier for your child to learn new words. They’ll be able to break down those words into each letter and sound them out.
Substituting
Substituting is the ability to swap out phonemes within a word to make a different word. For example, if you learn to substitute and memorize the word “could”, you’d be able to swap out the first letter to create “should” and “would”.
What is the Phonemic Awareness Program?
Our Phonemic Awareness program help to develop your child’s literacy abilities and listening skills. We use a variety of stories, songs, and rhymes to promote creative thinking and literacy skill development in a fun and supportive environment.
Additionally, we use many types of activities to help your child build a comprehensive literacy understanding. Your child will take part in small group activities using special books, discs, and wireless headphones to enhance their phonemic awareness. We then supplement this learning experience with multi-step direction activities to support the comprehension of auditory skills.
How the Our Phonemic Awareness Program Can Benefit Your Child
Once your child becomes phonemically aware, phonics comes much more naturally. From there, spelling words will become a lot easier — when your child can split words into sounds, they’ll know which letters make up a word.
Our Phonemic Awareness program will make learning to read easier for your child. Children starting elementary school with a high level of phonemic awareness become more confident readers, making the process of learning to read a lot easier and more fun — when they come across new words, they can sound them out using their phonemic abilities.
