What Is Phonemic Awareness? And How Can It Help Your Child Read?

As adults, it might be easy to forget how difficult it was to learn to read. But you'll likely be reminded as your child starts building their literacy skills – especially when you hear teachers talk about things like phonemic awareness. 

If you've ever heard this term but have been too embarrassed to ask what it means, you're not alone. There's a surprising amount of jargon in teaching!

What Is Phonemic Awareness? 

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds. It encompasses isolating, blending, segmenting, deleting, adding, and substituting sounds, all of which are necessary skills in addition to phonics instruction. However, it can be easy to overlook its importance in favor of phonics instruction, which is the recognition of letters. 

Practicing both phonics and phonemic awareness is important. That said, because phonemic instruction can be done entirely orally, teaching it before a child even sees or knows letters is possible. Phonemic awareness helps students hear the sounds in words and practice putting them together and breaking them into individual sounds.

By practicing the skill of blending and segmenting, they are learning to combine and separate sounds. When they apply their knowledge to phonics and start seeing the letters, they will already know how to take the separate sounds associated with the letters – /c/ /a/ /t/ – and combine those sounds – /cat/. The same is true for writing. If they practice segmenting or separating sounds in words, e.g.,/hop/=/h/ /o/ /p/, they will be ready to apply their phonics knowledge when they learn the letters associated with those sounds. 

How Can I Help My Child Practice Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness skills develop over time, so it's great to practice with students early on. These can be carried out in just five to 10 minutes of your day. For example, you can ask your child, "What is the first, middle, or last sound you hear in the word wig?" Asking questions like this will reinforce isolating individual sounds. You can have your child practice blending sounds by saying a simple CVC word broken up by its sounds and ask your child to blend the sounds back together. For example, /c/ /a/ /t/ = cat. Additionally, you can say a simple CVC word and have your child say each sound in that word separately to practice segmenting sounds. For example, cat = /c/ /a/ /t/

More challenging skills that your child can practice are adding, deleting and substituting the sounds in words. For example, "Say, at. What would the word be if I added a /b/ to the beginning? What's stork without the /k/? Say cat – now, what would the word be if I replaced the /a/ with an /i/?" 

While it may seem strange to incorporate these activities, you are laying the foundation for your child's flexibility in reading and spelling words.

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