Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness means an ability to pay attention to and manipulate the smallest units of spoken language (such as individual sounds or phonemes) and it also means the ability to articulate those sounds. There are many skills that fall under the umbrella of phonemic awareness and there is a lively debate right now within academic circles as to how best to teach phonemic awareness. The research I find the most compelling is that phonemic awareness is best done with in conjunction with letters and that the two phonemic awareness skills that most highly support reading are blending and segmenting. Clicking on “Phonemic Awareness” above will take you to more information about if your child is struggling with these skills and how best to support them.

Phonics

Phonics can also be described as knowing the letter sounds and rules for how they work within words. Now before you jump in and tell me how crazy English is (I’ll grant you that it is a compilation of several languages and that makes it more complicated than some languages) it does have rules that govern the way words work most of the time. These may be different than the rules we learned growing up and there are some rules that are really helpful for students to learn and practice and some that are so infrequent it can be more helpful to address these as irregular parts of words. When people talk about “decoding” they are using academic terms for “sounding out” words. If a student knows the phonics patterns (what sounds the letters will make), the words become decodable. Clicking on Phonics above will take you to more information about if your child is struggling with these skills and how best to support them.

Fluency

A fluent reader is one who can make the text sound like normal speech. This involves the rate at which they're able to read, the expression with which they read how they attend to punctuation. When a student experiences difficulty with fluency. it is important to consider whether they are actually struggling with a prerequisite skill or just need additional practice with a learned skill to make it more automatic. If a student is struggling with prerequisite skills, it is important to provide adequate reteaching and support on those skills to ensure they are reading accurately before focusing on fluency. Clicking on Fluency above will take you to more information about if your child is struggling with these skills and how best to support them.