- Children demonstrating weak phonemic awareness by the end of their first year of school are likely to demonstrate weak reading skills by grade five.
- 25% to 40% of all children will not be phonemically aware by the end of their first year of school.
- Children who do not acquire phonemic awareness skills before grade three will require four times more phonemic awareness instruction to ultimately acquire these skills in the upper grades.
Professional Development in Literacy
What is Phonemic Awareness?Phonemic awareness is a prerequisite to phonics, and serves as a powerful predictor of later reading achievement. Before you can teach a child "C" is for Cat, they must first learn how to form the sound /k/ in their mouth. When given the three individual sounds /p/- /a/- /t/, children who are phonemically aware understand that the word is pat. Successful training demands that children attend to spoken language, not lessons that simply ask students to name letters or tell which letters make which sounds (phonics).
Why Can't My Students Read?
Phonemic Awareness Before Phonics
A child learns to speak before they learn to read. So why not allow a child to develop individual sound isolation and sequencing (phonemic awareness) before we EVER instruct letters and reading (phonics)? All children must develop a basic skill set of foundational skills required for later reading success. Developmentally, these skills begin to emerge as early as age three when a child learns to rhyme. Later, beginning as early as age five, a child will need to acquire the skills of identifying separate sounds within words in order to blend and segment them efficiently. Lastly, beginning around the sixth year, a child must learn to manipulate single sounds in words in order to clearly judge word relationships based on word structure. Children without the foundational skills of sound comparison, sound blending and segmenting and sound manipulation, must be directly instructed in order to facilitate self-correction.
Who Struggles?
Up to 40% of school age children will not have the phonological processing skills necessary to readily access phonics instruction. Without preventative measures in place, these same children will likely be poor readers by grade five. This difficulty in judging sounds within words WITHOUT letters, leads to an inability to self-correct. The student is unable to judge whether what they say, matches what they see. This will cause errors such as reading ("sip" for "sap"), spelling ("gril" for "girl") and articulating (wreaf" for "wreath").
Preventative Solutions and Strategies
Based on National Reading Panel research, a child can acquire phonemic awareness skills in brief, explicitly controlled daily group instruction. At the preventative level, teaching children to systematically identify relationships within sounds and later relationships within spoken words, for just a few minutes a day, can lead to dramatic improvements in later reading and spelling.
Please allow our not-for-profit educational foundation the opportunity to share unique and highly researched phonemic awareness strategies to prevent future reading difficulties in your Pre-K through 2nd grade children. Catch them BEFORE they fall.
Read MTI's Methodology is Unique
Read MTI's instruction far exceeds the typical phonemic awareness instruction of rhyme and word play. Our unique instruction delivers three core components to GUARANTEE a student's foundational reading base. DISCRIMINATION: Teachers will discriminate between sounds (phonemes) by not only HEARING the similarities and differences, but by also FEELING and SEEING, how the sounds are produced in their mouths. SEQUENCING: Teachers acquire the concepts of blending and segmenting sounds in sequence ( /ch/-/o/- /p/ is chop ) to systematically attack words, a foundation for the development of future reading and spelling. MANIPULATION: Teachers will manipulate a single sound within a word to produce a similarly sounding but different word (remove the /t/ from stand and you get sand) this enables the student's later self-correction in reading and spelling.
