Supporting Phonological Awareness at HomeĮarly literacy development depends on a number of factors. Although we may think of reading as a visual activity, one’s ability to recognize and parse out the individual sounds in written text is fundamental to reading. After putting these sounds together into a word, we can then search for this word in our mental dictionary to find the appropriate meaning. This process is commonly referred to as decoding. By taking each of these three sounds, and blending them together, we are essentially sounding the word out in our head. When we look at this word we need to be able to first identify that there are three individual letters, each with a corresponding sound. Let’s look at an example like the word “dog”. Literacy is our ability to decode and comprehend written text, but phonological awareness underlies our ability to become literate. It is important to underscore the point that phonological awareness itself is not the same thing as literacy, but it is a prerequisite skill. For example, we know that “cat” and “bat” rhyme, because they end with exactly the same syllable, and only differ in the initial sound. Rhyming allows us identify words that share a common final syllable.The new word, “lead” has all of the same sounds as the original, with the exception that the “r” has been substituted. Imagine that you are asked what word we get when we replace the “r” in the “read” to and “l”. Substituting allows us to replace certain sounds with other sounds in words.Deleting is just the opposite: “ball” becomes “all” when we take away the “b” sound. For example, if we add the “b” to the word “all”, we have a new word: “ball”. Adding, deleting is the ability to create a new word when a new sound is added to the word.What word that is made up of the sounds “c”, “a”, and “t”? If you are able to recognize this as the word “cat”, then you demonstrated that you are able to blend sounds together to form a word. Blending is the ability to combine individual sounds or syllables, in order to form a word.“What is the first syllable in the word ‘folder’?”) When a child is able to identify that the first sound in the word “bus” is a “b”, they are exhibiting their ability to segment. Segmenting allows us to identify individual sounds within words.So what is phonological awareness exactly? Several related elements make up the set of skills that we refer to as phonological awareness. Those children who have difficulty with phonological awareness may require additional support. When a child has strong phonological awareness skills, they are well-positioned to develop strong literacy skills in the future. For typically developing children, phonological awareness does not have to be explicitly taught children acquire this skills as they are learning their language. As emerging readers, we rely on our ability to identify the constituent sounds that makes up words in order to learn what each word “sounds like”. Literacy acquisition is fundamentally dependent on phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is a critical skill in early literacy development. Phonological awareness, simply put, is our ability to identify and manipulate sounds and syllables in words and sentences. These are all examples of tasks that are related to phonological awareness. Have you ever wondered why children learning to read will start by sounding out letters? Or, have you wondered why clapping syllables is a helpful strategy for kids learning to count syllables in words? Perhaps you have though about how even young children are able to rhyme words without much direct instruction.
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