Phonemic Awareness
Activities, books and printables to help children learn about sounds in spoken words including rhyming words, alliteration, oddity tasks, and more.
Phonemic Awareness is
- The understanding that words are made up of sounds
- The ability to pick out and manipulate sounds in spoken words
- Together with alphabet recognition, a key to early reading success
- Developed in part by listening to rhymes, rhyming words, poetry, songs and wordplay
Phonemic Awareness is not related to print. You will not need a pencil, paper or books to help your child develop phonemic awareness. Phonemic Awareness can be developed while you are on a walk, driving a car, lying in the dark or enjoying a great book.
Phonemic Awareness Tasks are Mainly Oral
Is your child able to hear rhymes and/or alliteration?
- in poetry: Hickory dickory dock The mouse ran up the clock
- in songs: Rain, rain go away, Come again on another day
- in nonsense: She sells sea shells down by the sea shore.
- Could your child tell you whether king and ring are rhyming words?
- Can your child hear that the words in ‘blue balls bounce’ all begin with the same sound?
Could your child…
- Listen to three words, and hear the one that does not rhyme?
- Look at items on a tray and identify the item that begins with a different sound?
- Listen to a story about Cathy. ‘Cathy likes cookies, candy and cake.’ Could your child say whether Cathy would she prefer crayons or pencils? Camping or hiking?
And, could he or she blend sounds together and create words?
- Listen to the word parts (syllables), say the word. The first part is air… the second part is port. What is the whole word?
- The first part of the word is /r/. The second part of the word is ug. What is the whole word?
- Listen to the word parts, /h/ /u/ /g/. What is the word?
- Conversely, could he or she orally segment words?
- What sounds do you here in cat? /c/ /a/ /t/
Activities You Can Use to Promote Phonemic Awareness
- Read poetry!
- Read and enjoy lots of rhyming stories with your child. Another time, when you reread the stories, pause when you come to the matching rhymes, see if your child can ‘fill in the blanks.’
- Play with Hink Pinks. A Hink Pink is a pair of rhyming words that answer a riddle. For example, a large hog is a Big Pig, a fight over a baby’s toy is a Rattle Battle.
- Twist Your Tongue – Have fun with tongue twisters like Rubber baby buggy bumpers and Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers! Help your child to make up silly alliterative sentences.
- Make up an unusual list – ‘I’m going camping and I’m going to pack a bat, a cat, a rat.’ OR ‘I’m going camping and I’m going to pack a sock, a sleeping bag, a soccer ball, and a sandwich. Do you think I will want a sweater or a jacket?’ Ask your child to suggest some more things for your list. Can your child hear how your words work together?
- Make a poster or a book – create a book of words that begin with a particular sound or create a book of rhyming words
- Play I spy with my little eye, something that begins with /s/ (use the letter sound rather than the letter name)
- Clap to the beat of songs and poems
- How many rhyming words can you make up? (nonsense is okay)
- Ban, can ,dan, fan, gan, han, jan, lan, man…
- Sort picture cards into rhyming families
- Make up word riddles – what starts with /b/ and rhymes with red?
Phonemic Awareness Printables
Our early literacy printables, including our phonemic awareness printables are in PDF format, if you don’t already use Adobe Reader, you will need to download it to access the printables.
Please note: some of our early literacy printables are available to Storytime Standouts members only. To become a member of the website (without cost or obligation), please click on the “Members” tab and register as a user.
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