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/. 

Research is very clear that Phonological Awareness is a foundational strategy for students to obtain the necessary literacy skills to read and spell effectively and efficiently. However, teaching older students phonological awareness skills can be difficult because many of the resources out there are geared towards younger students and the images, worksheets, and resources can be insulting to older students.

We know the importance of phonemic awareness for our young students - but we absolutely cannot forget about this literacy skill when it comes to working with our older students!

We wanted to dive into some of the core components of literacy (reading and writing) in order to help you, as parents, continue to support your children in developing solid literacy foundations at home. We know there is a lot of jargon surrounding the field of education so we want to try and break that down for you.