Phonemic Awareness

• Foundation for Phonics: Students learn that words are made of small sounds (phonemes), which is an essential skill for learning and understanding letter-sound relationships (phonics).

• Decoding & Encoding: Students learn to blend sounds to read words (decode) and break words into sounds to spell them (encode).

• Morphological Awareness: After phoneme awareness is established, students move into morphological awareness. This is the ability to add prefixes and/or suffixes to change word meanings, without the printed letters. Eg, read + ing = reading. At this stage, you are just seeing the word in your head and manipulating its sounds.

• Predicts Reading Success: Strong phonemic and morphological awareness strongly predicts a student's future reading ability, especially when reading larger, multisyllabic words; poor skills often lead to reading and spelling difficulties.

• Builds Fluency: As decoding improves, so does reading fluency, allowing focus on comprehension.

• Supports Spelling: Students learn that sounds map to letters, which leads to more accurate spelling.

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