Supporting Phonemic Awareness

Learning how to read and write has an abundance of components for a student to become a successful reader and writer. The different components to reading and writing is phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Putting emphasis on phonics only will not allow a child to excel in learning how to read or write. In this article Supporting Phonemic Awareness Development in The Classroom they emphasize the importance of phonemic awareness. Even though this article focuses on one component, educators have to bear in mind that all components are equally important to understand to read and write. Some educators confuse phonemic awareness with phonics, auditory discrimination or phonetics. On page 131 in figure 1 in the article

Instructions for phonemic awareness comes from activities that are child appropriate, deliberate and purposeful, and only one part of a broader literacy program. Some examples, of activities in instruction is songs, word-sound games, nursery rhymes, and story books like Dr Seuss. When picking these activities there should be a deliberate and mindful reason behind the activities to have an effective development in phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is important in the context of a comprehensive reading instruction. Teachers ought to consider different dimensions of instruction, for example, units of sound, tasks or operations, and use of cues. Timing is a crucial understanding to teaching phonemic awareness. There is no set time schedule for teaching phonemic awareness due to every student learns differently. Recommended time is anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes a session for 3 weeks up to 2 years. Even though these times are recommended, understanding that every child is different we should base the time off of the quality and responsiveness from the lesson to the student. This article gave examples, of some activities that can help in the development of phonemic awareness. They explained that some activities can be strictly oral, use auditory, visual, and kinesthetic cues. Some of the activities they had in this article

Prior to this class I thought phonics and understanding the sounds (A for Apple /a/) was all that was needed to know in the alphabet to understand to read and write. It is known now even with my personal understanding that learning how to read and write goes deeper than understanding the sounds of the letter and what the letters look like in a word. As a young child I had a difficult time reading and I now understand my phonemic awareness was weak. I recall as a young child not understanding how to rhyme and pronounce words properly and due to my lack of understanding how to read I had a tough time writing stories, essays, summaries and poems. I remember despising anything that had to do with reading and writing from grade 4 to undergrad of college. That is an extended time to not appreciate reading and writing. Now I enjoy reading and my writing skills has tremendously improved over the years. My daughter (Ava) who is in 4th grade is having the same issues I had as a young child. She has been diagnosed with a learning disability and her neurologist have stated that she is slightly dyslexic. She has a hard time in pronunciation and forming sounds in a word. When Ava does not understand a word she invents words. For example, if she sees the word participate and does not know how to pronounce the word she would quickly say party. She currently sees a reading specialist everyday for