Phonological Awareness

1. Teaching Young Children to Decode: Phonological
Awareness, PhonemicAwareness andthe Emergent
Reader

2. What do we need to know about the English
Language?
• 26 letters
• 44 phonemes (sounds)
• 500 spellings to represent 44 phonemes
For example: Long e can be spelled like me, flee, flea
AND Long i can be spelled like night, like, my.

3. Phonological Awareness
The foundation for phonics

4. Why teach phonological awareness?
• Part of Big 5…
“The importance of phonemic awareness is
underscored by the No Child Left Behind Act, which
stipulates that it is one of the five areas in reading in
which students in US schools must be proficient.”
(Nettles, pg 186)

5. Why teach phonological awareness?
• Part of a balanced approach…The Cueing
System (pg. 12)
Remember this theory from the Theory
Module??
“Graphophonics help the reader determine the pronunciation of a word in
print, based on the letters she sees.” (Nettles, pg. 13)

6. Why balanced approach?
From the diary of a Pre-School Teacher
My five-year old students are learning to read.
Yesterday one of them pointed at a picture in a zoo
book and said,
"Look at this! It's a frickin' elephant!"
I took a deep breath, then asked....."What did you
call it?"
"It's a frickin' elephant! It says so on the picture!"

7. And so it does...
" A f r i c a n Elephant "

8. What does balanced instruction look like?
• Meaningful instruction: games, active
• Is guided by theory

9. Theory of how readers learn
• Learn from being active
• Learn from talk
• Learn from an organized, supportive
environment
• Learn from individualized instruction
• Learn from constructing own knowledge
• Teacher's role is to scaffold

10. Read the following sentence and then make a facial
expression similar to the one child had on his face.
The small child had an infractaneous
look on his face.
Were you able to decode this word? Did you
know what it meant?
oYou probably had a difficult time with this
one because infractaneous is not a real word;
therefore, we do not know if the child is mad,
sad, scared or happy!
Remember
READING IS A MEANING MAKING PROCESS. IT
IS MUCH MORE THAN JUST SAYING WORDS!

11. Phonological Awareness
• Highlight this definition in your glossary.
Awareness of and the ability to manipulate sounds of
spoken English.
• This is the foundation for phonics (beginning).
• Highlight phonemic awareness in your glossary.. These
are the steps of phonological awareness.
Awareness of rhyme, onset/rime, syllables and phonemes
•

12. Phonological Awareness
Highlight the definition of a phoneme.
The smallest unit of sound in a spoken language.
Example: The word cat has 3 phonemes /c/ /a/ /t/
Highlight the definition of a grapheme.
A letter or cluster of letters representing a single sound or
phoneme.
Example: The word like has 3 phonemes /l/ /i/ /k/ (you can’t
hear the e, it is not a sound). The word like has 4 graphemes
that represent those sounds.

13. Phonological Awareness
Let’s practice counting phonemes…
1. Draw 4 boxes like this.
2. For each word, saying the sound not the letter, push your finger from
below the boxes into the box.
3. Like: only has 3 sounds so use 3 boxes.
/l/ /i/ /k/
bright: has 4 sounds, so use 4 boxes:
/b/ /r/ /i/ /t/
ship: has 3 sounds, so use 3 boxes:
/sh/ /i/ /p/ (SH is one sound)
If this is tricky for you,
there is more practice in
the Try It section. This is
on the TeXes exam so
please make sure you
understand.

14. Phonological Awareness
• Why teach phonemic awareness?
“Phonemic awareness is very helpful for
knowing how to take apart and blend sounds
together-something that is needed later, when
trying to decode unknown words.” Nettles, pg.
186.

15. How do we teach phonological awareness?
• Games
• Oral…no letters! The focus is on the sounds, not the
letters.
• Use the continuum (see next slide) to know where to
start.

16. Phonological Awareness Continuum
Rhyme/Alliteration
Sentence Segmenting
Syllable Blending and
Segmenting
Onset Rime Blending and
Segmenting
Blending and
Segmenting Individual
Phonemes
Phonemic Awareness
Begin here!

17. Rhyme and Alliteration
This tends to be the easiest so begin here.
Remember the focus is on the sound not what
the word looks like or starts like!
Example:
Using The Relatives Came, read a sentence. Find one word that has many rhyme
sounds, like Dad. Go around the room or group and say rhyming words with Dad.
The same can be done with alliteration. Go around the room and say words that
begin like Dad with a /d/ sound.

18. Sentence Segmenting
Once students have a grasp on rhyme and
alliteration, you can begin working on sentence
segmenting. This means to break apart a
sentence, word by word. This can be done by
clapping or patting your knees for each word.
Example: Take a page of Knuffle Bunny and read one sentence. “Trixie went
boneless.” Clap or pat for each word making sure that they only clap once for
boneless.

19. Syllable Blending and Segmenting
Once students get a grasp of a sentence and a
word, begin breaking apart words by syllables.
Example: Take the word, Trixie, and break it up by syllables for students. You might
say, “Tri and xie say…”. Students should reply with Trixie! This is blending!
To give students the opportunity to segment, ask them to break apart a word like,
laundry. Their reply should be, “laun----dry!”

20. Onset and Rime Blending and
Segmenting
We will discuss onset and rime again with phonics. The
onset is the beginning of the word (before the vowel)
and the rime is from the vowel to the end. For example
with the word Rime, the onset is /r/ and the rime is
/ime/.
Example: Give students various picture cards. They must look at their picture and
say the onset and then the rime. For example, dish would be /d/ /ish/.
Using Knuffle Bunny, take various words from the text. The teacher says the onset
and rime and the child says the word. Bunny would be /b/ /unny/

21. Blending and Segmenting Individual
Pennies
• This is what was demonstrated on slide 15. Students
take apart the whole word, sound by sound.
Remember chair would only be 3 sounds…/ch/ /a/
/r/. It is not by letters, rather sounds! More practice
is available in the Try It section.
Once students achieve this stage, they are considered
to be Phonemically Aware. This tends to be the most
difficult concept of Phonological Awareness.