Phonemic Awareness

What this learner might look like...

Struggles to do one or more of the following:
- Rhyme
- Identify syllables within a word
- Segment words into parts (no text presented)
- Identify the first, last and medial sounds they hear

Assessments that may indicate areas of concern:

IGDIS: Picture Naming, Rhyming, Sound Identification, Which One Doesn’t Belong First, Sounds/Alliteration
FAST: Onset Sounds, Letter Sounds, Word Segmenting
AIMsWEB: Letter Sounds (LS) and Phoneme Segmentation (PS)
DIBELS: First Sound Fluency (FSF) and Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF)

Diagnostic Assessments to guide instructional planning:

(See your Keystone Special Ed consultant for more information.)

Diagnostic Assessments
Simple Phonemic Awareness Assessment (courtesy of Wendy Robinson)

Instructional Plan

Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear, isolate, discriminate, and manipulate individual sounds or sound combinations. This is where learning to read begins. Children become aware that speech is made up of sounds, and they need to hear those different sounds before they can begin to understand the sound-symbol relationships of phonics instruction. Remember, this is a skill that can be done in the dark!

Directly teach the following skills in a consistent routine:

Courtesy of Florida Reading Research Center and Wisconsin RTI Center.

Interventions may be similar to classwide PA activities but may need to be more explicitly taught with more opportunities for practice.

This video explains what a syllable is, provides a multi-sensory approach, and provides opportunities to practice. Note: words are presented to help the teacher know what to say, but no text is introduced to the student at this stage.

This video highlights an instructional routine with one student. He has mastered the first few skills after multiple sessions, but struggles with the segmenting of a word, which would be the focus of the next intervention.

Key Concepts of Phonemic Awareness Instruction:

Routines should allow multiple opportunities for practice over time (not just "one and done")
Multi-sensory components will help solidify concepts (coins, claps, movement, pictures, etc.)
This should not be the only piece to their literacy instruction! These students still need to have rich exposure to literature and other literacy skills.
It's never too late to address PA. Sometimes older students need to learn these skills in order to build their reading skills!

General Outcome Indicator

(How do you know it’s working?)

Orally produce rhyming sounds and words
Orally identify the first and last letter sounds in a spoken word
Orally identify the medial sound in a word
Blend sounds together to form a whole word? (e.g. /s/ /i/ /t/ becomes sit)
Orally segment words into individual phonemes? (eg. cat becomes /c/ -/a/-/t/)
Can show sufficient skills on this Phonemic Awareness Assessment