Phonemic Awareness adds on to the previous skills learned about sentence and word identification and structure by honing in at the word level. You start with learning how to both break apart or "segment" sounds in a word and how to put together or "blend" the sounds to make a word.

Next you work to isolate the beginning, middle, and end sounds of words and then categorize other words based on a given attribute. For example, a beginning sound category would group "cat, cup, cot", and ending sound category would group "cat, nut, hat", and a middle sound category would group "cat, hat, man".

Advanced skills involve manipulating words by adding sounds (pan + t = pant), deleting (flat - l = fat), or substituting new sounds (change /c/ in "cat" to /r/ to make "rat").


Parents: For an FCRR.org handout on basic phonemic awareness click here.
For an advanced phonemic awareness skill handout click here.

Teachers: For a sample lesson plan on phonemic awareness you can use in class click here.