Phonemic Awareness: The Five Components Of Reading

The five components of reading are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. These five components work together to form a child’s reading experience.

• Phonemic awareness is important because it improves student’s ability to read unfamiliar words by sounding them out. It also improves comprehension when reading. If a student has phonemic awareness he or she can identify words that start with the same sound, the beginning and ending sounds of words, combine and blend separate sounds in a word, and break a word into its separate sounds. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify, think about, and manipulate sounds in spoken speech. This is not the same as phonics. Activities in phonological awareness are based on many skills that are developed with time. The skills are rhyme, alliteration, sentence segmentation, syllable, onset and rime, and phonemes. The objective of phonological awareness instruction is for all children to develop an awareness that words are composed of phonemes and to develop the ability to manipulate sounds in words.
• Activity 1: Students will be sitting on the floor in form of a circle and only one student in

The students will be sitting in a circle. The teacher will begin saying a chant while walking around to a child. Then the teacher will say “bippity boppity bumble bee, will you say your name for me?” Then the child will say his or her name for example, Mellissa. Then the teacher will say “Let’s all say it” and the class will say her name out loud, while clapping once for each syllable. Then the teacher will say “let’s all whisper it” and the class will whisper her name, while quiet-clapping the syllables again, once per syllable. The teacher can end the game by saying to the class “bippity boppity bumble bee, thank you for saying your name for me!” Then they can repeat the game with another child’s