Phonemic Awareness

 

Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) within spoken words. It's a crucial skill for developing reading and spelling abilities, as it helps learners understand how sounds and letters are linked. Essentially, it involves understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units. 

For example, blending sounds to form words like /c/ /a/ /t/ to make “cat”, and deleting or replacing sounds like taking the “s” away from “stop” to get “top”.

 

San Bernardino County Superintendent of Schools is offering the Footsteps2Brilliance Bilingual Reading Program for FREE to all San Bernardino County families to help their children, birth to 3rd grade, prepare for kindergarten and succeed in school. Learn on the program 15 minutes everyday!

 

Created by literacy experts, Sounder & Friends® targets the critical but often neglected skill of phonemic awareness. Children need to be able to blend, segment, and manipulate the sounds in words in order to read and spell proficiently.