Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds in the spoken language. It is a prerequisite for phonics, which is associating those sounds with letters, and then manipulating them. I just started working for our after-school tutoring program, which means I'm helping a dozen of the most struggling readers in first grade (3 from each class).

The students at my school were tested using DIBELS at the beginning of the year, which measures phonemic awareness (breaking spoken words into their component sounds, like "fan" is fff-ah-nnn,) phonics/decoding (reading nonsense 3-letter words like "div"), and letter names. So when I got these students, I tested their phonemic awareness again, since they had all passed letter naming and it is the next skill step they need to master before going on to be able to read.

And (I'm going to brag on myself a little bit) my three students jumped from being able to segment between 4 and 8 sounds in a minute to being able to segment more than 30 sounds in a minute, which is to say, they are almost on grade level for phonemic awareness now! I was thrilled. It is the first real proof I have that I am a better reading teacher this year, and it makes me really happy. I will have a more complete picture after I also retest their decoding skills, but I feel like they are a mini-barometer for the class. (You are only as strong as your weakest link, right?)