Phonemic Awareness

I had my last meeting with my kindergarten buddy. I hope he learned as much from me as I learned from him. The last activity we did is called Interactive Spelling. The goal was for my buddy to listen to the sounds I was making and associate them with letters. I would make the sounds by stretching the words. For example, one of the words I used was ‘get’. I would say the word slowly and stretch each sound so that all sounds are clearly heard. I asked my buddy what sound he heard at the beginning and what letter goes with that sound. He wrote the letter down. We did this for each sound: beginning, middle, and end, until each part of the word was spelled out.

I learned a lot about my buddy through this activity. For example, he gets the ‘a’ and ‘o’ sounds mixed up sometimes. One of the words I stretched out for him was cart. He wrote it as cort. He had a harder time with vowels, but with there was one example of his struggle with a consonant. Instead of writing the word ‘had’ he wrote ‘hat’. After a few more examples where he displayed difficulty differentiating the vowel sounds for ‘a’ and ‘e’ I decided to work on two similar words: bet and bat. I had him pay close attention to my voice when stretching the words. He also had a hard time with ‘e’ and ‘o’ so we continued this practice with the words ‘get’ and ‘got’. As we did more examples like this, he became more confident making these distinctions.

In Word Identification Strategies, we have read about the importance of phonemic awareness. It requires children to identify single sounds. Phonemic awareness makes it possible for kids to use phonics to read and spell new words. It was interesting to read that kindergarteners that have good phonemic awareness become better readers than kids that have good rhyme awareness but less developed phonemic awareness. It is more beneficial for kids to learn to identify single sounds than to depend on rhyming to be able to read words. Identifying single sounds will help children better identify words. It will give them the ability to distinguish and manipulate individual sounds, helping them decipher new words. As a future teacher it is great to read about these things now. Helping kids create phonemic awareness will allow them to become better readers, and also help them relieve the stress that accompanies learning how to read, as it would ideally make the process smoother.