What is the Phonological Awareness Process?

Developing phonological awareness is an important part of a child's language development. It involves recognizing and manipulating the individual sounds that makeup words, which can help to improve skills like reading, spelling, and writing. 

This guide will walk you through the basics of this process so you can help your students become phonological awareness pros!

What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness can feel like such an overwhelming thing to teach. Honestly, it is quite a broad skill that includes the manipulation of some parts of oral language. This can encompass vocabulary, syllables, onsets, and even rhymes. Luckily, the Alphabet Flashcards and Phonic Builder Activity are here to help! 

By building phonological awareness in pre-school, children can learn to better recognize these sounds and apply them to other language-based tasks such as reading and spelling.

Phonological Awareness Process

The Beginning

Simply, the process starts with letter recognition. Being able to easily identify letters is a necessary skill. The naming of letters makes a connection between the student and the written text. Therefore, students must gain the crucial understanding that when the letter is put together, they form words. Thankfully, the Alphabet Flashcards are the perfect resource for teaching letter recognition. Thus, our phonological awareness goal is for students to know most of their letters by the time students start kindergarten.

The Middle 

Honestly, we all have students who struggle with reading in our classrooms. Many times this stems from poor phoneme awareness. Phoneme awareness is a small piece of phonological awareness. Specifically, it is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken language. For students, this is the ability to hear the sounds that individual letters or small groupings of letters make. Thus, it is the next building block in the science of reading, after letter recognition. For struggling readers, going back to the beginning and reteaching basic letter sounds can be beneficial.

The End

Ultimately, the end of learning reading skills for our students is of course—reading! Specifically, this happens when students can successfully take letter recognition and phoneme awareness and sound out unknown words on their own. The Phonic Builder Activity is a great way for students to show their understanding of this skill. Truly, this is what we are all striving for with our students.

Resources to Support Phonological Awareness

Alphabet Flashcards: These printable flashcards are no-prep and easy to use and include 9 pages that print in beautiful colors. To maximize the effectiveness of the phonological awareness process, it is important to invest in resources that support phonological awareness. Specifically, the flashcards are great for independent practice, center time, or a quick time filler for a round-robin full class activity. You can even print them, cut them, and laminate them for multiple uses. It is a great way to improve phonological awareness among those students who have not mastered letter recognition.

Phonic Builder Activity

Phonic Builder Activity: As we know, being able to recognize individual sounds or blends is imperative for reading success. The Phonic Builder Activity is a great way for students to show their understanding of this skill. First, students are given a phonics card with room to write out 9 different words with an elkonin box at the top of the page. Next, students are given pre-cut letters to help them form words and show the breakdown of the sounds. Laminating or applying velcro on the letters and elkonin boxes makes this a long-lasting manipulative in your phonological awareness toolkit. Additionally, you can turn this activity into a fun competition to see how many words can be formed!

Benefits of the Phonological Awareness Process

Honestly, teaching reading skills can feel overwhelming and challenging. Thankfully the Alphabet Flashcards and Phonic Builder Activity can lessen the stress by providing ready-to-use activities. It is also great to have this Phonological Awareness Mega Bundle handy. This is a great supplement to weekly taught phonics, as it has weekly common words and each phoneme or digraph has a specific set of words that allow students to build a comprehensive picture of the sound.

Ultimately, the phonological awareness process is essential in helping your students develop an understanding of language. In addition to supporting phonological awareness, it can also give them the tools they need to become successful communicators. Just remember, it is okay to go back to the beginning, and that baby steps are still steps forward!

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