Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words and is an important precursor to learning phonics and reading. It should be explicitly taught and assessed in early years, as research shows a link between strong phonemic awareness and later reading success. Phonics teaches letter-sound relationships to help children blend sounds into words. Both phonemic awareness and phonics are essential foundations for reading.

4. Phonemic Awareness
• Phonemic awareness is
NOT phonics.
• Phonemic awareness is
AUDITORY and does not
involve words in print.

5. • Research indicates a strong
relationship between early phoneme
awareness and later reading success
and, conversely, links reading failure
to insufficiently developed
phonological awareness.
Intervention research clearly demonstrates the benefits of explicitly
teaching phoneme awareness skills. It is recommended that you
screen Prep children for phonemic awareness within the first two
weeks, as well as struggling students.

7. Phonics is a method of teaching reading which
first teaches the letter sounds so that
children can blend these sounds
together to achieve full
pronunciation of whole words.
The method relates to the
English language only.

9. RWI cards used
throughout the
SSP Approach
SSP Blue Level Sound Pic Sandwich
(split digraph)
Speech Sound Clouds used to show all spelling variations for the speech sounds

10. Of COURSE you need all five elements, but phonemic awareness and
phonics are needed to create a solid foundation for life.
Without it, your wall will always be shaky and not serve it’s purpose.
Bringing Research Into Classrooms 4 Kids
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