Phonemic awareness is an understanding of the sounds and groups of sounds that make up spoken words. Phonemic awareness is an important building block toward successful reading and writing skills. When children can hear, analyze and identify the sounds in words, they are enabled to read accurately and spell words correctly when writing. Rhyming is the first level of phonemic awareness. More advanced phonemic awareness includes alliteration, segmenting and blending, and substitution.
Rhyming is one of the most basic levels of phonemic awareness. Two words rhyme when they have the same sounds at the end, such as cat and hat. When you are focusing solely on phonemic awareness, words that have different spellings but similar sounds also rhyme, such as rail and pale. Children can listen to a pair of words and decide whether or not they rhyme. They can also generate a list of rhyming words when given a single beginning word.
Alliteration is the next level of phonemic awareness. It is the ability to hear that two words have the same beginning sound, such as cat and car. Again, when you are dealing with phonemic awareness, the words cat and kite have the same beginning sounds even though they do not have the same initial letters. Alliteration can focus on a single letter sound or a blend of sounds. For example, children could generate a list of words that start with the --sh sound like shoe.
Segmenting and blending are levels of phonemic awareness that involve breaking a word into its component sounds and then blending the word back together again. For example, the word mat can be broken into the sounds /m/ and /at/ or the sounds /m/ /a/ /t/. Segmenting is an important skill for writing and spelling since it allows children to break down a word and figure out how to spell it. Blending involves taking the component sounds and blending them into a whole word.
Substitution is the most advanced level of phonemic awareness. It involves substituting one sound in a word for a different sound and creating a new word in the process. For example, if you take the /m/ sound out of mat and substitute the /c/ sound, you get the word cat. This skill comes after all of the other phonemic awareness skills since children must be able to both segment and blend words to substitute sounds.