Kindergarten is a complicated place, and never is it more complicated than in September.
I sat with a little boy today and it went like this:
Me: “Let’s practice stretching out some words. I’m writing about dogs. Help me stretch out the word dog. D–ooooo-g”
Kid: “Dog.”
“Great. Now stretch it. Say it slowly. D-d-d-oooooooooooooo-g-g-g. Now you try.
Kid: “Turtle.”
Me: ??
Kid: “Turtle cat! Hahahahahaha!”
And it continued on from there. Sigh.
Aside from a lot of silliness involving “Turtle-cat,” I was reminded today that many of our kindergarteners need a lot of support with phonemic awareness. When we ask kids to “stretch out a word and say the sounds,” a lot of them have no idea how to do that, yet we often gloss over the “stretching out” part and emphasize the part where we “find a letter that makes that sound.”
What is phonological awareness? What’s phonemic awareness? What’s the difference?
In a nutshell, phonological awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate sounds. It has nothing to do with knowing which letters make the sounds. It’s being able to actually hear the sounds. For example, to some kids, the words “chip” and “ship” and “slip” pretty much sound the same. Phonological awareness is also about being able to manipulate the sounds, like saying the word “dog” and then being able to say it without the /d/ –> “og.”
Phonological awareness includes clapping out syllables, rhyming words, and deciding whether or not two words have the same beginning or ending sound. Phonological awareness also includes phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness is being able to hear the smallest units of sound (phonemes), or individual sounds in words. It’s being able to segment “dog” into /d/o/g. (In case you were wondering, after much playing around with words, my kindergarten friend above was not yet ready to segment the sounds in “dog.”)
What is phonics?
Put simply, phonics has to do with knowing which letter or group of letters correlate with the sounds. Occasionally, adults assume there is no need to do much phonological or phonemic awareness work if kids know a lot of letter names and letter sounds. However, contrary to that belief, many kids know letter names, and know a sound for each letter (phonics), but actually do still have trouble hearing and manipulating individual sounds in words (phonemic awareness).
How do I know if kids need help with phonemic awareness?
Many schools give an assessment to all kindergarteners, such as the PASS, or Marie Clay’s ‘Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words’ assessments. If your school doesn’t use something like this, you might informally assess during word study, or writing workshop by asking students to stretch out words, clap out syllables, and manipulate words in different ways. The great thing about these assessments are that the same activities that assess are often activities that also help teach!
Here are a few favorite phonemic awareness activities for assessing and teaching phonemic awareness:
Leaving Out A Sound
Try playing with words by asking children to take out parts. Start with leaving out syllables, and move on to leaving out an initial or ending sound. Just say the words aloud to work on phonemic awareness–don’t write them unless you want to also work on phonics.
Say rainbow. Now say rainbow again, but leave out bow.
Say writer. Now say writer again, but leave out er.
Say friendship. Now say friendship again but leave out ship.
Say dog but don’t say the /d/.
Say hot but don’t say the /h/.
Say sad but don’t say the /d/.
Segmenting
- Show kids how to point or make a dot where each word will go before they write a sentence. Pointing or making a dot one word at a time, helps kids hear each word in the sentence (phonological awareness). Believe it or not, somekidsarehearingsentencesasonebiglongstringofsounds. Can you imagine what that must be like for them? Before diving into stretching out the individual sounds in an individual word, they may need some help hearing the words inside their sentences.
- Clapping out syllables in longer words is a great first step for practicing segmenting sounds in words. But-ter-fly. Tramp-o-line. Gym-nas-i-um (phonological awareness).
- Play with onsets and rimes, by saying the first part of the word, and asking the child to fill in or change the rest of the word. You could say the onset (everything before the first vowel), and they say the rime (everything after the first vowel.) The name game song is a great way to do this work: “Katie Katie bo baitie Banana fanna foe faitie. Me my moe matie. Katie!” (phonological awareness).
Beginning, Middle, and Ending Sounds
Elkonin boxes (or “sound boxes” as they are commonly called) are a helpful tool for teaching children how to identify and segment each phoneme (separate sound) they hear.
Start by making the boxes. Here are what Elkonin boxes for CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words look like. One box for each sound:
Then demonstrate saying the word slowly, and pushing a counter into a square for each sound (a coin, a unifix cube, tile, or any small object will do). Don’t write any letters unless you want to also work on phonics. Then give the kiddos a turn! Use the words “beginning sound” “middle sound” and “ending sound” consistently. For many kids, the concept of the “beginning” sound will be completely new.
Sometimes colleagues tell me that they feel intimidated or uneasy about setting out to teach phonemic awareness, because it all feels so technical. Even the terminology is tricky: phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonics… I like to think of teaching phonemic awareness as being just like kindergarteners themselves–complicated indeed, but also a lot of fun.
TWO WRITING TEACHERS 
This post took me back to my days as a kindergarten teacher. I always felt teaching kindergarten writers was almost two separate tasks- teaching them they have a story to tell and how to tell it, draw representational pictures, etc. and then teaching them how to write letters,words, and sentences. I had to laugh about the kindergartener who answered “turtle”! This is the challenge of kindergarten. It is true that just because kids can name letters and make sounds doesn’t mean they understand how to put those sounds into words. I love Kathleen Wright’s idea of physically writing on the rubber band and using that stretching gesture. I always found physical gestures really helped solidify learning. Interactive writing was always a fun way to model how to make the process more transparent for the kiddos. Great post, Beth!
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Gosh, Beth, only you could take a somewhat difficult concept and make it seem so understandable! This is a great, great post that is helpful for so many of us that never had any formal early literacy training! Love this post AND all the thoughtful comments people have left so far!
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What a clear and helpful post! As a parent, this is something I’m dealing with as Isabelle begins to emerge as a writer. I know I will return to this post and your tips again and again in the next couple of years.
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This post is brilliant! So very timely as we launch writing workshop in primary grades! Thanks Elizabeth for your sound, clear activities to promote confident, fearless writers.
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An important post. I agree that there is confusion at times with children knowing some letters and assuming that phonological awareness is solid.
I’ve written a series of 8 posts in the last month aimed at this topic. The initial post can be found here. http://maryannreilly.blogspot.com/2015/08/early-literacy-series-1-shared-reading.html There are links to the remaining 7 posts at the bottom of that post.
Hope it’s helpful.
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I’m looking forward to reading your series of posts, Mary Ann. Thanks for sharing them here.
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Love your post. I really like teaching phonemic awareness because there are so many ways to play with the teaching and activities. One way I introduce the concept of stretching a word is to write a word like ‘cat’ on a fat rubberband with a thin sharpie marker (the rubberbands that come on a bunch of broccoli are good for this.) I show the kids this little word on the rubberband– they all eagerly look because writing on a rubberband is neat– and I say “When we talk about cats, we just say cat… like, ‘I see the cat, that cat is gray,’ The word is just little like I’ve written it here when we say it in an ordinary way. But when we stretch the word cat to hear its sounds, we have to say it slowly like this, ‘c-aaa-t’ It’s sort of like we stretched this rubberband so the word would be long like this” and I stretch the band and show them the stretched out ‘cat’ printed on it. It’s pretty effective because all the letters get long. They love this and immediately try saying c-aaa-t, and then we move on to other words. We also use a little motion with our hands like we are stretching the rubberband, and since they’ve actually seen the rubberband stretch, and done it a few times themselves, the motion makes sense. After we’ve done this over several days, I make the stretch motion as a first prompt to kids when I see they are struggling with writing a word. They still might not know which letters go with which sounds, but being able to stretch the word out is a first step to hearing those sounds. I’ve heard of kids going home and writing words on the family’s rubberbands, much to the amusement of their parents.
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