Reading Foundations

Bonita Lucas

October 20, 2024

Reading Foundations

Reading Foundations: A Guide for Teachers and Caregivers

Understanding how children learn to read is essential for anyone supporting early literacy. In this post, I’ll walk you through three core components: phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics. Whether you're a teacher just learning the science of reading or a caregiver looking to help your child, this guide will equip you with explanations, activities, key terms, and helpful resources to get started.

What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the sound structures of spoken language. This includes larger sound units like words, syllables, onsets, and rhymes. It is a foundational skill for reading, as it helps children understand that words are made up of smaller sound units.

Activity example for phonological awareness:

• Syllable Clap Game: Have children clap their hands for each syllable in a word. For example, for the word “banana,” they would clap three times: “ba-na-na.” This helps them become aware of the syllable structure of words.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness. It focuses specifically on recognizing and manipulating phonemes, the smallest units of sound in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is crucial for learning how to read because it supports a child’s ability to segment and blend sounds, which is key for decoding words.

Activity example for phonemic awareness:

• Sound Segmentation Practice: Say a word like "cat" and have the child break it into its individual sounds: /k/, /a/, /t/. You can use counters or tokens for each sound the child hears, helping them visualize the phonemes.

What is Phonics?

Phonics is the relationship between letters (graphemes) and their corresponding sounds (phonemes). Once children have developed phonemic awareness, they can begin to map sounds to letters and start decoding words. Phonics instruction teaches children how to apply their knowledge of letter-sound relationships to read and spell words.

Activity example for phonics:

• Letter-Sound Hopscotch: Draw a hopscotch board with different letters or letter combinations (graphemes) in each square. When a child lands on a square, they say the corresponding sound (phoneme) and a word that begins with that sound.

Key Terms to Know

• Phoneme: The smallest unit of sound in a word (e.g., /b/ in "bat").
• Grapheme: A written symbol (letter or group of letters) representing a phoneme (e.g., "b" in "bat").
• Onset: The initial consonant sound of a syllable (e.g., /c/ in "cat").
• Rime: The part of the syllable that includes the vowel and any consonants following it (e.g., -at in "cat").
• Blending: The process of combining individual sounds to form words.
• Segmenting: The process of breaking down words into individual sounds.

Suggested Resources

1. Books:
   • Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum by Marilyn Adams
   • ABC Foundations for Young Children by Marilyn Jager Adams
2. Videos:
   • 44 Sounds of the English Language
   • Reading Foundational Skills: Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics
3. Websites:
   • Reading Rockets – Offers information on phonics and early literacy skills.
   • Starfall – A free educational site for early literacy that offers interactive phonics games and activities.