Phonemic awareness is primarily games and activities that you play with your child that teaches him letter sounds. It is the basis for phonics. You may also see phonemic awareness referred to as pre-reading activities. A phoneme is a symbol that correlates with a sound, such as /d/ corresponds with the letter "d," as in dog. When you see a letter surrounded by slashes it is telling you the sound that letter makes, and not the name of the letter. This is the first step in the process of learning to read.

The Importance of Rhyming

The thing about phonemic awareness is that it capitalizes on the fact that children learn the sounds of the alphabet before they learn to read the letters. Based on this, rhyming words make it easy for a child to recognize the sounds of her language. A good example of a rhyming activity that you can play with your child is reciting Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. They are fun, vivid poems that children can learn easily. Another good way to use rhyming is by giving your child rhyming worksheets whereby she must circle the two words that rhyme based on pictures that she sees. For instance, if you have a picture of a cat, a girl, and a hat, your child would circle the cat and the hat.

Learning Syllables

Another example of phonemic awareness is the use of syllables in words. Words have rhythm. This rhythm helps children be able to break down and sound out words before being able to put the whole word together. A super activity that teaches this concept is showing your child a picture. Say the name of the picture and clap out the syllables. Now have your child try doing this on her own. Have her count how many claps it took to sound out that word. Notice you are using pictures instead of written words, as this is a pre-reading activity for young children.

Teaching Sentence Structure

Rhyming and learning to count syllables gives a child the idea of what a word is. Next, you need to teach your child that putting words together in a logical order makes a sentence. This is a three-step process whereas first your infant listens to words being spoken. A young child than mimics the things you say, either as babbling or as intelligent speech. The final phase is a child learning to put those words together in a sentence form and beginning to read. Reading a sentence is simply dividing the group of words into individual parts. Let your child read (sound out) each word in a sentence, and then put it all together. Of course, you will want to start with very simple sentences, such as two or three words per sentence, and gradually add more words as your child progresses.