Oh my goodness have things changed with the this pandemic. Most of the country, if not fully offering distance learning, is providing at least some form at this point. This has forced us to adjust, adapt and think differently on how to teach specific skills over a new platform. Teaching a skill which really requires manipulatives, especially during the initial stages, has been particularly challenging. When we introduce the skill of phoneme segmentation we use chips or blocks and have students move the items for each sound in the word. This hands on component is critical for most children. In the absence of face to face instruction, we’ve had to come up with a different option. If you haven’t yet

Phonemic & Phonological Skills Handout Teaching phonological and phonemic awareness skills is such a critical component in helping our little learners acquire the necessary building blocks to become proficient readers and writers. Understanding the sequence of phonological/phonemic development and the approximate ages of mastery helps us to know which skills to emphasize in our instruction. Download the free printable handout! Click the following link to download this free handout. Developmental Sequence of Phonological Skills What is Phonemic and Phonological Awareness? Phonological awareness is an encompassing understanding that speech can be broken into smaller segments of sounds. Great readers can recognize different parts such as words, syllables, onsets and rhymes, and phonemes. So, teaching these skills through age-appropriate activities is critical

The ability to separate the sounds of a word is called “phoneme segmentation”.  It’s a critical skill in both learning to read and write. By six and a half/seven years of age students should be able to tell you the sounds in a word. So, for example, if given the word “cat”, the student should be able to tell you that the sounds in “cat” are /k/ /a/ /t/.  Understanding that words are made up of separate speech sounds is an important foundational skill.  Phoneme segmentation is considered a “phonemic awareness” skill which falls under the broader category of “phonological” skills. Around the end of kindergarten/beginning of first grade we should be directly teaching students to segment words into their