Phonological and phonemic awareness skills

Friday 03 August 2018
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Does your school require you to use a specific phonics program but you’re a bit unsure whether your students have the basic phonological and phonemic awareness skills to cope with what they’re expected to do?

Phonological and phonemic awareness skills covers all the basics for early childhood children (from four years of age) but also assist older students who are struggling with phonics and spelling. It incorporates skills that fit into any phonics or spelling program.

Twelve skills are presented in developmental order and include the following:

Auditory discrimination.
Rhyming.
Alliteration.
Segmentation and syllabification.
Blending.
Phoneme matching.
Phoneme isolation.
Phoneme completion.
Phoneme addition and deletion.
Phoneme segmentation.
Phoneme substitution.
Phoneme reversal.

The last seven skills relate to phoneme manipulation.

The skills are presented as fun, hands-on games and activities for the whole class, small group and pairs, with full instructions (including the actual ‘words’ to say if required), all game resources, supporting worksheets (if applicable), differentiation suggestions, assessments and answers. Literature links and suggested websites for games are also included.

The activities are predominantly oral activities for four year olds but provision is also made for students who have letter–symbol correspondence, those beginning to read and older children who need support.

The games and activities are perfect for learning situations and easily managed by adult and parent helpers. They can also be used for early finishers to consolidate skills or to motivate students needing extension.

The activities link perfectly to the Early Years Learning Framework and the Phonics and word knowledge section of the Language strand of the Australian Curriculum English.

For teacher convenience, the product is provided in three different formats to suit your teaching style—as 13 full-colour downloadable digital units (the 13th is an in-depth assessment unit); as 5 large black-and-white hardcopy books; and as separate games with all the resources.

As a teacher, try these games and activities with your class for the first three skills. These ones don’t have any additional resources to make. They’re also great for lesson breaks or as attention grabbers!

Our new phonological awareness strategies and skills series has all these!