Week Seven Assignment Three

Phonemic Awareness

Pretest: 7/10                Post test: 10/10

            Phonemic Awareness is another important part of a reading program. It is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in the spoken word. This gives students the opportunity to change words by changing one phoneme. Phonemic awareness also allows students to understand that the sounds of spoken language work together to form new words. There are a variety of different terms that are used in reading programs to help break down the idea behind phonemic awareness.

            One of the important parts of phonemic awareness is phoneme isolation. Students should be able to recognize the individual sound within a specific word. Another term used in reading programs is the idea of phoneme identity. In this part of reading students are able to see that the same sounds are present in different words. For example, students are able to recognize that big, /b/ has the same sound has bun, /b/. Phoneme blending is the ability to recognize an “odd” sound in a set of three or four words. When students are able to recognize that big and bun have the same /b/ sounds, they are also able to recognize that “run, rat, and bus” are not all the same beginning phonemes. Students will be able to pick out that bus is not the same sound as the /r/ in run and rat.

            There are also terms used to recognize when to blend phonemes together to make different words. This term is called phoneme blending. For example, students can understand that by combining the sounds /b/ /i/ /g/ that they can form the word big. On the other side of that argument, phoneme segmentation is when students are able to break down a word into different phonemes. This is an example of when students are giving the word big and asked to break it down into /b/ i/ /g/. The two final terms discussed in the workshop is called phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution. The idea of these two terms is that they are similar yet different. Phoneme deletion is when a child is able to remove a phoneme in a word to make an entirely different word. One example of this is when students are given the word “smile”, asked to remove the /s/ and come up with the word “mile”. Phoneme substitution on the other hand is when students add a specific phoneme to a word to create an entirely different word by substituting a specific phoneme. An example of this is when a student is given the word “bug” and asked to replace the /g/ sound with the /n/ sound to create the word bun.

            This workshop was very well organized and I learned a lot from what I was given. I do not think I have any questions other than the idea of being able to put this into practice. I would love to make learning fun for the children and I believe it is best when the children do not even realize that they are learning because they are having so much fun within the activity. If I were to address any concerns it would be only to seek help for how to make this type of instruction fun and educational for the children.