Phonological Awareness: A Must Skill6 min read

Every kid, who has just started to learn to read, faces many challenges.

If these challenges are met at an early stage, the kids tend to become fast and fluent readers. However, most parents tend to ignore these small phonemic skills among kids and complain about their kid’s lousy reading skills thereafter. Building a solid foundation for your kid is highly essential to get them literacy success in their future. Today we will tell you about phonemic and phonological awareness. Kids need to develop phonological awareness skills to become good readers of tomorrow. Therefore, every parent must look after the phonemic and phonological awareness skills of their children.

What is Phonological Awareness?

“Phonological awareness is the grasp of the one-of-a-kind approaches that oral language can be divided into more minor aspects and manipulated.” In simple terms, it refers to the more significant “chunks” or “parts” of language. Parents can work at the phonological focus level of their kids and ask kids to try to create a rhyming sentence, combine small phrases to make a compound word, and tell apart the syllables in each word. Phonological awareness can be elaborated as an idea of a large umbrella, with the more significant “chunks” of language being the pinnacle of the umbrella.

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness can be simply explained by saying that understanding that spoken phrases are made of unique sounds referred to as phonemes. A phonemic is the smallest unit of sound we hear in a word. Phonemic awareness falls under the umbrella as a sub-category of phonological awareness. Rather than working with large figurative devices of spoken language, parents can ask their kids to pay attention to the more prominent sounds or phonemes in a spoken word. When we ask children to mix phrases into the smallest unit of sound they hear, we work at their phonemic skills. For example, the four sounds /p//l//a//n/ can be blended to make the complete word “plan”.

Why is Phonemic Awareness Essential?

Phonemic awareness is the single quality predictor of analyzing the knowledge of the language in younger kids. It helps them to up their grasp of spelling-sound relationships. This is how literacy preparation starts during the early years of your kid’s education and leads without delay to excellent reading skills: analyzing written words primarily based on every letter’s sound.
Since studying and spelling capabilities go hand in hand, phonemic awareness will assist youngsters to grow to be more suitable readers, spellers, and writers. However, when kids start to study without solid phonemic skills, they are likely to get confused when similar-sounding words cross their path.

How to Develop Phonological Awareness in Your Kid?

Kids can quickly develop phonological awareness skills from an early aged. Therefore, parents must look at some of the ways to develop skills in students. Here are some of the ways by which you can develop phonological awareness skills in your kid.

Focus on Their Knowledge of Rhyme

It is the prime duty of parents to focus on the rhyming skills of their children. Ask your youngster to pick up rhyming words from the books without anybody’s help. In addition, you can try to give your own words and tell the kid to find rhyming words for those. For example, you can say the word ‘fox’ and tell your child to find its rhyming words, and they might find some rhyming words such as axe, tax, sacks, and so on. This will help you know where your child stands in phonological awareness. Look closely at which words your kids choose and whether they rhyme perfectly or it just has a very minimal rhyme, or it does not rhyme at all.

Listen Up

Good phonological awareness begins with youngsters grasping the power of sounds, syllables, and rhymes in the phrases they hear. We recommend you to read stories aloud to your kid frequently. Choose poems that have rhyme or repeat the equal sound. Draw your child’s interest to rhymes: “Fox, socks, box!

For example, if you read out words like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, ask your little one to pay attention to the /fffff/ sound in fish. (Really stretch the sounds out at first.) Outside of storytime, try to point out phrases that begin with the /fffff/ sound to have a practical approach.

Follow the Beat and Get into Guesswork

Parents can help their kids in understanding the various kinds of beats. First, make all beats clear to them by telling various clapping sounds and all the other kinds of sounds. For example, you can tell them to pronounce the word elephant appropriately. The pause after each word and clap out each syllable together. Moreover, this will help your kid in understanding all the beats in an appropriate manner.

On the other hand, guessing games such as “I spy” can assist you in working on your kid’s phonological skills.

Connect the Sounds

Connecting different sounds is very crucial during the early reading years of your kid. Youngsters need to develop the habit of connecting sounds from a very early stage. They need to know how to put sound units or phonemes together so that words can be read smoothly. However, if kids do not know how to connect different phrases, they will not be great with their pronunciation. Parents can help their kids to start working on putting the same sounds together through various activities. For example, if you are a parent, you can ask your kid to connect the beginning sounds with the rest of the word. There are numerous ways to follow this method.

You can use the letter P and tell them to add IG. Now let your child guess which is the word and how to pronounce it. If they guess the word right with the correct pronunciation, you can believe that they have good phonemic awareness skills.

Break Apart Words

Breaking compound words and forming two new words is a bit easy. However, kids sometimes face problems doing this. This is due to a lack of phonological skills. To begin with, you can use words such as basketball, firefly, firefighters or cowboy and ask your kid to form some new words out of them. After that, there are plenty of compound words so that you can move from easy to complex.

Now say the word cowboy and take the boy away. Now ask your child which word is left?

Search Online

Today we have plenty of sources where we can explore unlimited ideas to work on the phonological awareness skills of your kid. For example, you can use YouTube to educate your kid about various sounds. You can also find games and songs to make your kid’s phonological awareness skills strong.

Remember that forcing your kid to give a proper answer is not an accurate way to teach them and one should not be too harsh on the kid as it might severely impact their minds. Moreover, you can use various games, and also you can take extra help from online and offline resources.

These were some of the ways through which you can quickly develop phonological skills in your kids.

Conclusion

Some kids are extraordinary with sounds; however, some face issues in guessing the right one. Parents must not get frustrated if their kid faces such problems. Instead, it’s better to assist your kid to better their understanding of sounds. You can use multiple methods as elaborated above to develop phonological skills in your kids. These skills are highly sought after at every stage of their lives.

Thus, don’t let your kid lag behind in any field.