Phonological Awareness simply means the ability to hear and play with the smaller parts (sounds and syllables) that make up words.  Strong phonological awareness skills are important for reading success.  If children have well developed phonological skills when they begin kindergarten, they have a strong foundation in understanding how sounds and letters in printed words are connected.  Being able to hear the sounds that make up words helps children sound out written words as they begin to read.

Phonological Awareness can be broken down into 6 core skills:

Word Awareness:  Recognizing word boundaries in spoken language (e.g., “He is Sam” is three words).

Syllable Awareness:  Recognizing syllable boundaries in spoken language (e.g., “butterfly” is three syllables).

Segmenting:  Breaking larger oral language units into smaller units (e.g., “bat” to b-a-t).

Phoneme (sound) Identity:  Identifying a particular sound in a word (e.g., “mat” starts with the /m/ sound).  Note: we are referring to sounds, not letter names.

Alliteration Awareness:  Recognizing common sounds across words at the beginning of words (bug, bat), and the end of words (tip, flop).

Blending:  Combining smaller oral language sounds (phonemes) and chunks (syllables) into larger units (e.g., f-r-o-g to “frog” or flow-er to “flower”).