Sound! It! Out!

As we head into the second marking period of the 2022-2023 school year, classroom teachers and instructional coaches of our reading team will be working with students on continuing to develop phonemic awareness skills. With testing now complete, we will start working in small group interventions with students that may need extra support in their phonemic awareness development. As always, we want to keep strong connections between students' school and home learning experiences and have provided helpful information and strategies below to positively strengthen your students' phonemic awareness development.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to manipulate and identify individual sounds called "phonemes" in spoken words. Phonemes are combined to form words and syllables and can include letter combination blends such as /ph/ or /st/. As the foundation for word and spelling recognition, phonemic awareness is crucial for students as they learn to read and write. Some students may face challenges when developing their phonemic awareness skills, however, there are a variety of ways to help students practice these skills to become fluent readers! The best part about practicing phonemic awareness skills is that they "can be done in the dark"! This means that almost all of the activities do not require materials as the focus is on sound and active listening!!

Rhyming is considered the first step toward building phonemic awareness. Rhyme encourages children to actively listen to the sounds and word parts of words and identify them. If I Can Say, You Can Say, is a very simple phonemic awareness activity that can. be done at any place or time, in the car on the way to school, when going on a car trip, or even just around the house.

Directions

Start by saying words that rhyme and read books with rhyming words and patterns so that your child becomes used to hearing and repeating rhyming words. When your child is comfortable with rhyming words and understands the concept, you can move to ask your child to identify two rhyming words such as "hat" and "bat". Next, you can ask your child to think of words that rhyme with each other for example "If I can say /rat/ you can say" with the child answering with a word that rhymes.