Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words are made up of sequences of speech sounds.  The child’s level of phonemic awareness upon entering school is one of the strongest indicators of how well he/she will learn to read.  Children must have an understanding that words are made up of separate speech sounds that can be broken apart and put together to form words.  Without this understanding, learning the alphabet doesn’t make much sense.  Although some children enter school with an appreciation of the sounds of language, many do not.  The exciting part is that, as teachers, by assessing our students’ phonemic awareness skills early on, we can identify those who