By Paula Fisher | Posted: Thursday November 3, 2022
This is Kaikorai Primary School's second article in a series relating to Structured Literacy. In this article we will be looking at Phonological Awareness.
Phonological Awareness is an important element that is taught to children at Kaikorai Primary and incorporated into our Structured Literacy lessons.
What is Phonological Awareness?
Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate sound structures within words.
Why is Phonological Awareness Important?
Phonological Awareness is critical for learning how to read and spell. Children who have strong Phonological Awareness skills can become strong readers.
Components of Phonological Awareness
During our Structured Literacy lessons at Kaikorai Primary, the different components of Phonological Awareness are covered.
Listed below are the different components that we teach and some examples of the sorts of things that we might be focusing on with the children in our class:
*Auditory Discrimination
e.g., ran ran run / pin pin pen
*Syllable Blending
e.g., mi/lo = milo, chim/pan/zee = chimpanzee
*Syllable Segmenting
e.g., robot = ro/bot bumblebee = bum/ble/bee
*Rhyme Identification
e.g., men ten, hand land
*Rhyme Generation - teaching and assisting the retrieval of rhyming words
e.g., spot trot, club grub
*Onset and Rime
Deleting the onset from the rime
e.g., man without the /m/ ‘an’
Deleting the rime from the onset e.g., man without the /an/ ‘m’
*Syllable Deletion
Compound words - deleting end syllable
e.g., batman without the ‘man’ = bat
Deleting the beginning syllable
e.g., batman without the ‘bat’ = man
*Initial Sound Awareness
e.g., see, sip
*Initial Sound Generation - teaching and assisting the retrieval of words that begin with the same sound.
e.g., see, sand, sound
*Blending Sounds
e.g., a-s ‘as’ wr-a-p ‘wrap’
*Isolating Sounds
e.g., up ‘u-p’ cat “c-a-t”
*Phoneme Manipulation
e.g., “If I have shop, and I change the sh to ‘ch’, I will have chop.”
How Phonological Awareness is Taught at Kaikorai Primary
At Kaikorai Primary, the teaching of Phonological Awareness is taught through our Structured Literacy class programmes.
In classes, children may be engaged in whole class Phonological Awareness lessons and activities, small group lessons and activities or individual activities, according to specific needs.
Phonological Awareness is taught explicitly and using a set sequence of lessons, activities and Phonics books, so that nothing is left to chance.