What is Phonemic Awareness and why is it important?

If you Google the phrase "phonemic awareness" you will find thousands of different definitions. My definition is basically that "phonemic awareness" is the auditory ability to understand, identify, discriminate, and manipulate sounds (in isolation, syllables, and words). Children who are successful "pre-readers" usually have good phonemic awareness skills. Generally, if you can increase a child's phonemic awareness skills, reading and spelling abilities also increase.

So what kinds of activities increase phonemic awareness skills?

• Rhyming Reading rhyming books to your child and playing rhyming games in the car are excellent ways to introduce and reinforce rhymes.
• Blending "What word am I saying? mmm aaahhh mmm (mom)"
• Segmentation "How many sounds do we hear in the word 'it'?" "How many syllables do we hear?"
• Deletion "Say 'clap' without the 'l' sound."
• Substitution "Get the word 'can' in your head. Now take the 'n' away and put a 't' in its place. What word do you have?"
• Reversal "Take the first sound and make it the last sound and take the last sound and make it the first sound: 'tip' becomes 'pit'."