Phonemic Awareness

 While reading the article entitled “Teaching Phonemic Awareness,” I was able to learn some very valuable information about helping students in my future classroom. Before the article, I had no idea that students could learn phonemic skills through daily play with themselves and others. By giving me examples of how to facilitate these phonemic awareness activities, I now feel much more prepared to tackle these issues within my own future classroom.

One of the activities that really interested me within the article was the Hinky Pinky game. I had never heard of this before, but quickly became a fan of it. With this activity, students are able to practice sounds and word awareness in an engaging and fun way. In order to play, students come up with a rhyming word pair answer (duck truck, soggy doggy, etc). They then think of a riddle that describes the two words they just came up with. For example, if the children came up with the answer funny bunny, the riddle could be what would you call something that tells jokes while hoping around? The article stated that students really enjoy this activity and that it is a great way to develop sound awareness within the classroom.

Another way that they article described as helping nurture phonemic awareness was called inventive spelling. This is when students attempt to spell words using only their prior knowledge of the English language. By doing this, they often spell words wrong.  However, they are still getting much needed practice with spelling and language sounds. Eventually, with this, they will start to spell the words conventionally and without help. It has been shown that students who participate in inventive spelling when learning how to write often become fluent writers when they move onto higher grades.

Both the Hinky Pinky activity and inventive spelling are ways in which teachers can help nurture phonemic awareness that students should develop just by simply playing with words. If students seem to struggle with phonemic awareness after a certain age, however, their teachers should give them more specific instruction. This could include sound matching, sound isolation, sound blending, sound substitution and sound segmentation. All of which provide the student with the support needed to succeed.