Phonemic Awareness Activities
These phonemic awareness activities are sure to add lots of fun to your Science of Reading phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade.
Phonemic Awareness Resources
Phonemic awareness is a critical aspect of reading instruction. Blending, segmenting and manipulating the individual sounds in words is a foundational element to learning to read.
It falls under the larger umbrella of phonological awareness, which deals with sound parts in words. This includes things like rhyming, counting syllables and onset and rime.
The smallest unit of sound in a word is called a phoneme. These sounds aren't the same as individual letters. Digraph sounds like /ch/ are made up of two letters, but they make one sound. So the word chat has 3 phonemes - /ch/ - /a/ - /t/.
Phonemic awareness skills are very important to learning to decode words when reading and encode words when spelling.
Students will learn to tie these sounds to letters when developing phonics skills. Both phonics and phonemic awareness are critical to learning to read successfully.
Phonemic Awareness Printables for Science of Reading Instruction
This page includes free printables that will provide extra, hands-on practice with skills such as isolating phonemes, blending and segmenting phonemes and manipulating phonemes.
These hands-on activities are perfect for independent practice after you have taught these skills through listening and speaking.
I prefer to integrate phonemic awareness and phonics skills by bringing in hands-on practice with letters while working on phonemic awareness. As a result, many of the activities included on this page give students practice with both letters and sounds.
Building Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Skills
We compiled all of our phonemic awareness resources here, so you can quickly and easily find the resources you need, when you need them.
We are always adding more resources for teaching phonemic awareness skills, so I highly recommend you bookmark the page and come back as needed.