Literacy Journal Week 3

Fox Chapter 2:
What is the difference between phonemic awareness (PA) and phonics?
Children love to play with sounds. When have you heard children playing with sounds? What kind of sound awareness are they demonstrating?
Books and poems are wonderful for encouraging children to attend to sounds. Find a book or poem to share in class that focuses on sounds in some way. What kind of sound awareness does the book promote? What activity in Chapter 2 might complement the sound orientation of your book?

Phonemic awareness may be considered a subset of phonics. Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear separate sounds in words and to blend sounds to form words. Phonemic awareness is not concerned with print. Phonics, on the other hand, refers to all those skills (and the teaching of those skills) that enable a reader to decode words and to spell phonetically. As well as phonemic awareness, phonics also includes word awareness, syllable awareness, rhyme awareness and sound-letter correspondence.

Many children do love to play with sound. I have heard young children play with sounds by stringing together nonsense words, just for the fun of the way they sound together. Similarly, I can remember hearing young children substitute silly words for real words in conversation, sometimes seemingly just for the silliness and sometimes because of the fun way the silly word sounds. I would argue that silly language play has developmental value. A child who enjoys stringing together silly, similar-sounding words is building his or her phonemic awareness - no flashcards or drills required! Even a parent not schooled in literacy development probably recognizes the fun of a classic Dr. Suess book with all of its silly and nonsense words. Hooray for Dr. Suess!

I looked back through a stack of picture books from my children's early years to find one that encouraged phonological awareness. Denise Fleming's "In the Tall, Tall Grass" is a colorfully illustrated (Eric Carle-esque) simple story of all the activity that occurs deep in the tall, tall grass.

Most page spreads include both first-sound matching word pairs and rhymes. For example:

"dart, dip, hummingbirds sip"
slip, slide, snakes glide"
"zip, zap, tongues snap"

The pictures correlate well with the simple text, and preschoolers and kinders would probably succeed in completing some of the more predictable rhymes. I can imagine reading the book more than once to give the children a chance to chime in with rhymes once they are familiar with the story. Some children might also be also to identify words that start with the same sound, a skill which usually develops a little later than rhyming.

I think the target audience for this book would be three- to five-year-olds, although some two-year-olds might enjoy it as well. A kindergarten teacher might use it during the first part of year as part of a program of phonemic awareness.

Because this book is geared toward very young children, I would choose a follow-up activity that was similarly geared toward preschoolers. For example, I might have available sets of simple two-part puzzle cards, which would be completed by joining the pictures of two rhyming words.