Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Jared Weisberg
October 19th, 2014
Phonemic Awareness



The article that I have read and I'm willing to elaborate more on is, Teaching Phonemic Awareness, written by Rasinski and Padak.  In this article we were introduced to phonemic awareness and what exactly the definition is and how to incorporate strategies into your classroom.  Phonemic awareness refers to, "a person's awareness of speech sounds smaller than a syllable and the ability to manipulate those sounds through such tasks as blending and segmenting sounds in words" (Rasinski and Padak 43).  As on can assume, phonics is almost the gradual step into what separates the great readers from the poor readers.  As a result, it's in our best interest as Elementary School Teachers, we implement these strategies and activities into the classroom in order to help each and every student become stronger phonemically.  I can recall a moment in Elementary School when our teacher gave us a sheet with sentences that hard words very similar to one another but one wasn't correct while the other was.  The objective of the worksheet was to have the students acknowledge the similar syllables and how the words can rhyme but being able to word recognize what was correct.  I found this worksheet to be helpful but wished we did more like this in order to increase our knowledge on phonemic awareness.  Overall, the main point I gained out of this article was phonemic awareness is essential for phonics and reading success, however, in order to find great success in your classroom we need to have a wide variety of strategies, activities and techniques in order to teach all children and find success.