To teach, or not to teach phonological awareness…this is the question (especially because research seems to be ever-changing in this area)!!

Check out this blog for answers to understand its importance, target specific skills, and integrate PA seamlessly into your lessons. Explore why phonological awareness matters for all ages and how to make it feel cohesive.

Can you spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Can your students? 

In all seriousness, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious isn't the most functional word to spell – but as students progress academically, they do need to be able to break down long words for reading and spelling. Keep reading to learn why syllable segmenting is necessary and how to incorporate this instruction into your lessons!

You might be wondering when it would be important to teach syllable blending. Is this a skill students even need?

The answer to that question is yes. This is a skill that students, in fact, need. But there are specific times when teaching this skill will be most important. Keep reading to learn more!

You may be wondering if teaching students to rhyme is really necessary. Recently, research has been mixed on whether or not we should be targeting this skill in our instruction.

The argument here is that it isn't necessary to teach because it doesn't directly translate to reading in the same way blending does.

So…should we be teaching rhyming? Keep reading to find out.

Phonological awareness is a key foundation for building early reading skills.

It's an umbrella term that essentially refers to the ability to break words into individual sounds, blend sounds to create words (sounding it out), and the ability to manipulate sounds in our language through tasks like rhyming, changing the ending sounds of words or the order of words (like in Pig Latin).

This is a topic that is near and dear to our hearts because it is so very important for our beginning and impacted readers. Phonemic Awareness refers to the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the sounds (or phonemes) in words. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. For example, the spoken word dog can be broken down into three separate and distinct phonemes or sounds; /d/ /o/ /g/.