Literacy ideas and resources - Tales from Outside the Classroom

Building Phonemic Awareness through Phonics: Phoneme-Grapheme Activities

Phonics and phonemic awareness are sometimes confused, likely because they are related. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds, phonemes, in words. Phonics is the relationship between the sounds of the spoken language and the letters and groups of letters, graphemes, of the written language. Phonemic awareness is critical for applying phonics skills. Students can learn and memorize graphemes, but if they cannot manipulate phonemes, they will struggle in their reading and

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18 Non-Print Phonemic Awareness Activities for Early Readers

In continuing my posts on phonological awareness, we’re focusing on phonemic awareness activities. If you missed my posts on What is Phonological Awareness and What is Phonemic Awareness, you might find it helpful to begin there. All of the activities in this post are without letters/print. When working on beginning phonemic awareness tasks, I believe it’s beneficial to do some practice without letters. The cognitive load required to do the phonemic awareness task and connect

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What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in words. It is the final component of phonological awareness. These two terms are sometimes incorrectly used interchangeably. The important distinction between the two is that phonemic awareness is on the phoneme level. It is under the umbrella of phonological awareness. Thus, a phonemic awareness task is a phonological awareness task but the inverse may not be true. Let’s start with a few key

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What is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds of language. As students begin to understand the connection between speech and print, they are able to segment sentences into words, then syllables, and finally to phonemes, or the sounds in our language. Alliteration and rhyming are also two phonological awareness tasks. Phonological awareness is often referred to as a continuum, however, not all skills are developed sequentially. While students need to be able

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I Am Thankful For Thanksgiving Writing Activity

With Thanksgiving around the corner you might be looking for seasonal writing activities. With this year being what it is, I wanted to design a digital Thanksgiving writing activity so it could work in any school setting: traditional in person, hybrid, or virtual learning. I am not a big celebrator of Thanksgiving. It’s a complicated holiday. I do, however, focus my Thanksgiving work in the classroom around being thankful. Our conversations in the classroom revolve

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Hi! I’m Tessa!

I’ve spent the last 15 years teaching in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grades, and working beside elementary classrooms as an instructional coach and resource support. I’m passionate about math, literacy, and finding ways to make teachers’ days easier. I share from my experiences both in and out of the elementary classroom. Read more About Me.

Building Phonemic Awareness through Phonics: Phoneme-Grapheme Activities