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What are Phonemes? What is Phonological Awareness?

They are necessary, critical components to successful reading.

Phonemes are the smallest sounds our language is broken into.  Cat has 3 sound parts or phonemes.  You can find a list of phonemes here. 

[The actual letters are referred to graphemes- if you don’t know the letters that match the word sounds you will experience difficulty spelling.

Phonemic Awareness: refers to speech (oral language); having an understanding that our language is broken into sounds.

Phonological Awareness means you have an understanding of how the words in our language are made up of sounds.

You can view a PowerPoint on the terms here. 

Teaching It:  Segmenting & Blending are Key!

To teach segmenting of words; you teach about the separate sounds of a word.  Cat has 3 sounds (phonemes), you would have the child read the sound parts of the word to segment it.   C    a     t

To teach blending; you kind of review the segmenting first, have the child speak the separate sounds, then once again have them say the sound parts quickly to ‘blend them together’ into a word.

Here is an article on tutoring Phonemic Awareness/

 

My dyslexic child has an understanding of the Phonemic nature of our language; yet he cannot memorize the rules to connect what phonemes make up certain sounds.  He will turn in an assignment on “light” for example; and have in his written answers – “light” spelled differently.  Lite  Ligt  lyte liht

I will add a photo at a future time.

 

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Dyslexia Study from 1997!! Shows the Importance of VISUALS

In my research, I found this old study rather interesting.  It presents a short article wherein it describes what it is like to think with Dyslexia.  It is a compilation of information from research from Harvard Medical Center & Central St. Martins College.

The Psychologist highlighted in the article designed a series of six tests of verbal, written and spatial ability.   She found Their visual spatial skills were also at a higher level – but they had difficulties with reading, writing and spelling.

Within this same article there is research from Harvard Medical Center.  They found “that dyslexics’ brains are “wired” differently from other people’s. “There is definite proof of a link between dyslexia and visual spatial ability,”

A researcher from Washington, named West adds the facts that the brain of a dyslexic person is wired differently.  “They lack efficiency in the left brain hemisphere which relates to language ability. But there is increased efficiency in the side of the brain which dictates spatial ability.”

A dyslexic himself, West shared that dyslexics:  “can rotate an image in three dimensions in their minds. Our educational system at the moment is based on words, books and lectures.”

A summary of my related opinions:

This heavy text-based verbal/written curriculum is not serving any of the Dyslexic students in the United States.  The work my child brings home is not very often visual in any way.  When I have asked about using visual videos to teach math I hear back, “no I haven’t ever done that.”  In today’s technology age- it is as easy as a little navigation and a click of the mouse to bring your classroom to life.  Visuals will engage both the dyslexic and non-dyslexic student and will bring new meaning to their studies.

For this reasons, I will repeatedly blog and share information about adding visualization to lessons, how to choose materials for the dyslexic child or student and more.