Phonemes: students learn about phonemes as they notice rhyming words, segment words into individual sounds, and invent silly words by playing with sounds, much like Dr. Seuss did. They learn about letters as they sing the ABC song, name the letters of the alphabet, and spell their own names. Phonemes are classified as either consonants or vowels.
Phonemes are the smallest units of speech, and they’re written as graphemes, or letters of the alphabet.
Phonemic Awareness: Phonemic awareness is children’s basic understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds, and it provides the foundation for phonics and spelling. Cunningham and Allington describe phonemic awareness as children’s ability to take words apart and put them back together again. Those who are phonemically aware understand that spoken words are made up of sounds, and they can segment and blend sounds in spoken words.
Graphophonemic- students learn about graphophonemic relationships as they match letters and letter combinations to sounds, blend sounds to form words, and decode and spell vowel patterns.
Graphemes: letters of the alphabet. It is the smallest meaningful contrastive unit in a writing system.
Teaching Phonemic Awareness: Teachers nurture children’s phonemic awareness through the language-rich environments they create in the classroom. As they sing songs, chant rhymes, read aloud wordplay boos, and play games, children have many opportunities to orally match, isolate, blend, and substitute sounds and segment words into sounds. Phonemic awareness instruction should meet three criteria. First, the activities should be appropriate for 5 and 6 year olds. Activities involving songs, rhymes, riddles, and wordplays books are good choices because they encourage children’s playful experimentation with oral language. Second, the instruction should be planned and purposeful, not just incidental. Teachers need to choose instructional materials and plan activities that focus children’s attention on the sound structure of oral language. Third, phonemic awareness activities should be integrated with other components of a balance literacy program.
-it is important children perceive the connection between oral and written language.
We can teach phonemic awareness through, sound matching activities, sound isolation activities, sound blending activities, sound addition and substitution activities, and sound segmentation activities
Elkonin boxes: Teachers use Elkonin boxes to teach students to segment words. The teacher shows an object or picture of an object and draws a row of boxes, with one box for each phoneme in the name of the object or picture. Then the teacher or child moves a marker into each box as the sound is pronounced. Elkonin boxes can also be used for spelling activities. When a child is trying to spell a word, such as duck, the teacher can draw these three boxes, do the segmentation activity, and then have the child write the letters representing each phoneme in the boxes.
Phonics: is the set of relationships between phonology, the sounds in speech, and orthography, and the spelling patterns of written language. The emphasis is on spelling patterns, not individual letters, because there isn’t one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes in English.
Consonant blends: occur when two or three consonants appear next to each other in words and their individual phonemes are “blended” together, as in grass, bely, and spring.
Consonant digraphs: are letter combinations representing single sounds that aren’t represented by either letter; the four mot common are ch as in chair and each, sh as in shell and wish, th as in father and both, and wh as in whale. Another consonant digraph is ph, as in photo and graph.
Vowels: the remaining five letters-a, e, i, o, and u – present vowels, and w and y are vowels when used in the middle and at the end of syllables and words. Vowels often present several sounds. Vowel sounds are more complicated than consonant sounds, and there are many vowel combinations representing long vowels and other vowel sounds.
Diphthong: Most vowel combinations are vowel digraphs or diphthongs: When two vowels present a single sound, the combination is a vowel digraph, and when the two vowels represent a glide from one sound to another, the combination is a diphthong. Two vowel combinations that are consistently diphthongs are oi and oy but other combinations, such as ou as in house and ow as in now are diphthongs when they represent a glided sound.
R-controlled vowel: When one or more vowels in a word are followed by an r, it’s called an r-controlled vowel, because the r influences the pronunciation of the vowel sound.
Phonograms: one-syllable words and syllables in longer words can be divided into two parts, the onset and the rime:
Onset: the onset is the consonant sound, if any, that precedes the vowel.
Rime: the rime is the vowel and any consonant sounds that follow it.
Example: in show, shthe onset and owis the rime.
Teaching Phonics: The best way to teach phonics is through a combination of explicit instruction and authentic application activities. Most teachers begin with consonants and then introduce the short vowels so that children can read and spell consonant-vowel-consonant or CVC-pattern words, such as dig, and cup. Then children learn about consonant blends and diagraphs and long vowels so that they can read and spell consonant-vowel-consonant-e or CVCe-pattern words, such as broke, white, and consonant-vowel-vowel-consonant or CVVC-pattern words, such as clean, wheel, and snail.
Minilesson: Decoding CVC words with final consonant blends
Stages of Spelling Development:
Teaching Spelling: Perhaps the best know way to teach spelling is through weekly spelling tests, but tests should never be considered a complete spelling program. To become good spellers, students need to learn about the English orthographic system and move through the stages of spelling development. They develop strategies to use in spelling unknown words and gain experience in using dictionaries and other resources. A complete spelling program includes these components:
-Teaching spelling strategies
-Matching instruction to students’ stage of spelling development
-Providing daily reading and writing opportunities
-Teaching students to spell high-frequency words
Classroom Application:
In the future, I will teach my students how to read and write. It is important that we as educators fully understand the terms and concepts in this chapter in order to be an effective teacher. Effective teachers teach their students to use phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling to decode and spell words. Teachers should ensure that their students are successful in “cracking the code” when they use the guidelines presented in this chapter! Teachers develop students’ phonemic awareness, teach high-utility phonics concepts, rules, phonograms, and spelling patterns, and teachers understand that students follow a series of developmental stages as they learn to spell words! It is important that I understand the stages of spelling development, in order to help my students succeed. I really enjoyed learning about the Elkonin boxes and I am sure I will use them in my future!
Brianne Brueggen Developing Literacy Blog 