Phonological awareness is an awareness that the words that we speak can be taken apart and
Phonological referring to the sound system of language. It's something that we do
Auditorally we're listening to words. We're listening to
Sentences we're listening to language and we're hearing it so it's not about what we're seeing
it's all about what we're hearing when we
Talk about phonological awareness with teachers and we teach teachers about that skill
we say phonological awareness skills can be done with your eyes closed so that they understand there's a distinction between
phonological awareness and phonics
Phonological awareness is a broad term that encompasses
Language in different sized chunks if that's one way to think about it. So
Sentence is going to be taken apart word by word. So young children can clap or March - I
like ice cream
I like pizza and we get them to really be able to take those those sentences apart word by word and
Understand words can be taken apart that way and then once they get that concept we can actually get them to clap
the syllables and words that have more than one syllable, so
elephant giraffe and
When they can do that we go to the next step where they have to actually break those syllables down into smaller
Units those units are referred to as phonemes a phoneme as a speech sound
so every language has a finite number of those sounds English has 44 of them and before we even
introduced
To the fact that these sounds are represented by letters again at a listening and an auditory level
We want them to be able to take those sounds apart within a word. So for example the words same
We have the child say same. I have the same color on today that my best friend does
Okay
so we put it in the context of meaning and then we start with the
Beginning sound and the word same and stretch it out. What's the first sound you hear in thing? And
Initially, it's gonna hear that per sound once they're good at isolating that initial sound
We then shift them to the final sound
same
and again because we're very
strategically and explicitly pulling out words that
Have sounds at the end at the beginning that can be stretched out. We can get them to be pretty good at
Accurately telling us the sound they hear at the end from there
We shift the medial sound the sound in the middle in this case a right so same
Again, we can stretch out that vowel sound. So in the word same
There are three sounds it may be confusing
And it can be confusing in some respects because the word same again as a skilled reader
we know there's an e at the end and
A lot of times we'll weep when we do these activities of great activities called state and move it. You'll get a precocious child
Pulling another chip them because they'll don't know there's another letter there
Say no this isn't about the letters that you're seeing. This is about the sounds that you're hearing. So
It's a very important skill phonemic. Awareness is very
predictive of a child's ability to be able to read words and decode so it's an incredibly important skill to teach and
important for
Teachers to understand there's a sequence of doing that right from the biggest sized
phonological awareness that we talked about earlier to those little bitty sounds
You