Red Apple Reading is committed to children's literacy! Here we will explore the importance of phonemic awareness as a foundation for reading. You probably already understand the concept even if you don't immediately recognize the name. Now for the definition: Phonemic awareness is the ability to understand how the spoken word is made up of individual units of sound, and how manipulating these sound units changes the meaning of words.
If you'll recall from our last Reading Essentials post, there are five essential skills your child must learn in order to be proficient in reading. Over the coming weeks, we will be exploring each of these skills in-depth. In this first post, we'll be discussing the first skill that your child must acquire—phonemic awareness—as well as tips and strategies you can use to support your child along the way to mastery of this skill.
Who isn't familiar with Jack and Jill tumbling down the hill, or Little Boy Blue falling asleep and letting his animals running amuck, or Little Miss Muffet getting scared by a spider? I remember reading nursery rhymes as a child from a big Mother Goose book that was very old, and is still packed away in the attic somewhere. When my daughters were young, they read from a more modern-looking book with larger print and more colorful illustrations.
These stories have been around for hundreds of years, and while fun to chant (I can still recite many of them from memory), they also serve a very important purpose in your child's reading development. Read on to find out why these old tales are still so important to share today.