What is a Phoneme

A “phoneme” is the smallest unit of speech sound. For example, the word pan has three letters and three phonemes (p/a/n). The word sheep has five letters but just three sounds, or phonemes (sh/ee/p). In American English, there is some debate about how many unique sounds are made in the English language. But for the purposes of teaching young children to read, there are 44 sounds for them to learn which includes individual letters and letter combinations (digraphs like ck and trigraphs like tch) that each also make just one sound. Listen to the phonemes here!

WHAT IS PHONEMIC AWARENESS?

Phonemic awareness has phoneme as a root word. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds – phonemes – in spoken words. This is a critical stage in a child’s literacy development.

WHY IS PHONEMIC AWARENESS IMPORTANT?

A child has phonemic awareness when the child can demonstrate an awareness of individual phonemes and can manipulate them in different ways. We see evidence of this important milestone when children can break words into individual phonemes (e.g., knowing /b/a/t/ makes bat) and blend phonemes together to make a familiar word.

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