Phonemic Awareness and Me!

Throughout this course we will work through the progression of phonemic awareness skills needed to begin to hear, understand, and manipulate language and phonemes to lay the foundation for reading. This course is based on the Science of Reading and the 40 years of research on how kids brains work, and how they progress and grow as readers. This class is for children beginning the journey of reading and for kids who are struggling at reading. Successful advancement and understanding within this course will open the door for early phonics skills and emergent reading. This class is conducted using all oral and visual cues. There is no print involved since the focus is phonemic awareness, not phonics.

This course will follow the following format:

(Weeks 1 & 2) Phoneme Isolation:
- We will work on identifying and isolating beginning, ending and medial sounds orally through word play games and alliteration stories. We will progress from the easiest skill, beginning sound isolation, and end with medial/vowel sound isolation. 

(Weeks 3 & 4) Blending: 
- During these weeks we will work on the process of being able to hear sounds and blend them together into words. This will start with compound words like (butter + fly)=butterfly and will progressively grow into a more complex blending task of 4 phoneme blending i.e. (/s/ + /m/ + /a/ + /sh/= smash). We will be using gestures and manipulatives to engage and help cement understanding of these skills. 

(Weeks 5 & 6) Segmenting:
- During these class meetings we will work on the process of segmenting or breaking whole words into its different phonemes. This will follow the same progression of working from segmenting compound words i.e. (butterfly > butter - fly) into segmenting words with multiple phonemes i.e. (smash > /s/ /m/ /a/ /sh/). We will be using gestures and manipulatives to engage and help cement understanding of these skills.

(Weeks 7 & 8) Manipulation:
- These last weeks of class we will be practicing the hardest level of phonemic awareness and that is manipulation of phonemes by adding phonemes, deleting phonemes, and substituting phonemes. When kids can manipulate phonemes successfully they have reached the level where they are ready to begin to learn phonics and start to become early emergent readers. We will do this using a variety of gestures, visuals, and movements to get them engaged and practicing these skills.