Phonemic Awareness
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Phonemic awareness is a skill we place a high value on at Woodland. Therefore, we feel it is very important for you to know and understand the value of the activities we are using to prepare your toddlers and preschoolers for reading.
Children who are aware of phonemes move easily and productively into spelling and reading. Children who are not aware of phonemes are at serious risk of failing to learn to read.
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Educators who teach phonemic awareness have found that doing so accelerates the reading and writing growth of children and reduces the incidence of children with reading delays.
The smallest units of speech that corresponds to letters of an alphabetic writing system are called phonemes. Research tells us that without direct instructional support phonemic awareness eludes roughly 25% of middle-class first graders. A large portion of people do not attend to the sounds of phonemes as they produce or listen to speech. Instead they process them automatically. Therefore, the challenge is to get children to notice the phonemes.
Research tells us that a child’s level of phonemic awareness on entering school is widely held to be the strongest single determinate of the success that she or he will experience in learning to read (Adams, 1990). At Woodland we are providing activities involving rhyme, rhythm, listening and sounds that research has proven to increase phonemic awareness.
