Teach Your Child Phonemic Awareness

In recent years, the field of reading education has changed dramatically and many reading instructors have divided it between phonic instruction and whole language. Various reading programs that fall into one of the two camps have spent millions advertising the relative merits of both.

The simple truth of the matter is that the best reading instruction takes place using a combination of both strategies. And increasingly reading research has demonstrated that phonemic awareness, not simply phonics, is critically important to ensuring reading successespecially for students with learning disabilities.

However what makes this so confusing for many parents and caregivers is that the term phonemic awareness is tossed around so often and in so many different ways. Phonemic awareness concerns the structure of words rather than their meaning. To understand the construction of our written code, words, readers need to be able to reflect upon the spelling-to-sound correspondences. To understand that the written word, beginning readers must first have some understanding that words are composed of sounds (phonemic awareness) rather than their conceiving of each word as a single...