Phonological awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of sounds and recognising how they come together to form words.
Children usually develop this skill at around 4 or 5 years old, and it's really important when learning to read.
We caught up with Early Years Practitioner Jamel Campbell to chat about phonological awareness and find out how you can best help your child's reading and communication skills.
At around four to five years old, children start to realise that words are made up of smaller sounds.
This is called phonological awareness. To learn to read, children need to develop an awareness of the very smallest sounds in words.
So for the word 'bat' there are three short sounds, or phonemes that make up the word, which are b-a-t. Bat.
Using the short sounds rather than the letters in the alphabet,B-A-T, really helps with their reading.b-a-t.
Keep sounding out words this way, to help your child's reading and communication skills. Check out my film with more tips to phonological awareness, to find out more.
What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that makes up a word.
For example, the word 'bat' is made up of three small sounds or phonemes. They are b-a-t.
Phonemes are the building blocks of language and are an essential part of learning to read and write.
Using these short sounds rather than the letters in the alphabet really helps with their reading. It's more useful to know the sounds letters make when you're reading because that helps children blend them together to make the word.
Learning the alphabet will come later at school once they've mastered this skill.
Keep sounding out words using letter sounds to help your child's reading and communication skills. Check out the Alphablocks guide to phonics for a breakdown of all the different letter sounds.
Examples of phonological awareness
Some of the skills associated with phonological awareness are:
- Identifying words that rhyme.
- Clapping out the number of syllables in a word.
- Recognising words with the same starting letter sounds. Ball and baby both have b at the beginning.
- Saying the first or last sound in a word. The beginning sound of fox is f.
- Combining the separate sounds in a word to say the word. For example, c-a-t makes cat.
Spotting the sounds in words and pointing out rhymes is not only great fun, but it helps to build phonological awareness that can help with their reading and communication skills.
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