Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the different sounds in words. It is an auditory skill, not a written skill. At the kindergarten level, phonemic-awareness activities focus on helping students to hear the beginning and ending sounds in words and on being able to segment words. Say two words, and have students decide if they have the same beginning sound. Generate a class list of words that have the same initial sounds or the same sound as a particular student's name. Give students two objects, and ask which one begins with a given sound. Make a memory game where pairs of cards are those where the pictured objects have the same initial sound.
Rhyming awareness is the ability to hear whether spoken words have the same ending sound. Practice listening for rhymes by saying a word, and then having children clap or raise their hands any time they hear a word that rhymes with your original word. Generate a classroom list of words that rhyme with a given word. For this activity, imaginary words are acceptable so long as they rhyme orally. Sing songs with rhyming words and have children clap or jump at the rhyme.
Syllable awareness is "the ability to hear parts or segments of phonemes [sounds] that comprise the rhythm of the word." Help students learn to separate words into syllables by having them clap or stomp for each syllable they hear in a word. The word "cat" has one syllable while the word "monkey" has two syllables. Have them go on a syllable scavenger hunt, and find things in the classroom with a given number of syllables. The word "pencil" has two syllables while "book" has one syllable. Sort small classroom objects like pencils and crayons into categories according to how many syllables they contain. For students who benefit from a concrete approach, have them use a penny or counter to represent each syllable that they hear.
Word awareness Is "the understanding that sentences consist of words and that those words can be manipulate." To develop word awareness, read poems or songs printed on large sheets of chart paper. Use a pointer to point to each word as you say it. Have students volunteer to hold and move the pointer as you read. Recite a sentence or line from a poem, and have students hold up one finger for each word that they hear in the sentence. In kindergarten, start with sentences that are three to four words long.
Sentence awareness is an extension of word awareness. It is the understanding that words appear in groups called sentences and that a sentence communicates a clear idea. Generate a class story that is three to four sentences long, and write one sentence on each line of a sheet of chart paper. Point out that each sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a punctuation mark. Have students use a pointer to count the words in each sentence. For a more difficult activity, copy one of the sentences onto sentence strips, and cut it to separate each individual word. Have students work together to reconstruct the sentence using the chart paper original as a model.