What is a phoneme? It is the smallest unit of sound heard in a word. For example, the word bat has three phonemes… /b/ /a/ /t/. Phonemes then combine to form spoken syllables and words.

What is phonemic awareness? It is the understanding that spoken words are made up of phonemes (or individual sounds). Because phonemic awareness focuses only on sounds, very young students can practice phonemic awareness before knowing anything about alphabetic letters.

There are many phonemic awareness skills that will help beginning readers. Here are many, listed in ascending order of difficulty.

• Sound and Word Comparison: What sound is not like the others: /m/ /t/ /m/? /t/
  What word doesn’t belong with the others: “sat”, “mat”, “cat”, “pan”? pan
• Rhyming: What word rhymes with “mat”? sat (or bat, rat, etc.)
• Syllable Splitting:
  What is the onset (first sound) and rime (all remaining sounds) of “mat”? /m/ /at/
• Blending*: What word is made when these sounds are blended, /m/ /a/ /t/? mat
• Phoneme Segmentation*: What are the sounds in “mat”? /m/ /a/ /t/
• Phoneme Deletion: What is “mat” without /m/? at
• Phoneme Manipulation: What word is made when you change /t/ in “mat” to /n/? man
  
  *Blending and Segmenting are high priority skills.

Why use hand signals? Hand signals help students “see” what is orally being practiced. They identify the signal with the type of skill being taught. I have different signals for segmenting, onset and rime, and rhyming activities (for instance). In this video, students are blending phonemes to make words. There are different hand signaling methods out there, but I like using this method for two reasons: (1) students can correlate the number of phonemes with the number of fingers held up; and (2) I can use the non-signaling hand to stabilize my reference material and keep my place! Students can also learn the hand motions and put them to use when trying to blend sounds as they begin to read. Without good phonemic awareness skills, a student trying to read sun (for example) might be able to say all the individual sounds, but struggles to blend and read the whole word.