Phonemic awareness is a children's

basic understanding that speech is

composed of a series of individual sounds

and it provides the foundation for phonics

and spelling. Components of phonemic awareness include rhyme, symbols, blending, segmenting, phonemic substitution, and phonemic deletion. Phonemic awareness is the awareness of sounds only! It is void of print. No letters are introduced, no sound to symbol correspondence is taught. Phonics on the other hand is a set of relationships between sounds and symbols of a language. Phonics involves the eyes and ears while phonological awareness involves just the ears. You can have phonological awareness without phonics but you cannot have phonics without phonological awareness.

Readers become phonemically aware by working with spoken language in five ways. First, readers learn to identify a word that begins or ends with a word. Second, readers learn to recognize the odd word in a group of words. Third, readers learn to remove a sound in a word and substitute it for a different sound. Fourth, readers learn to blend two or more individual sounds together to form a sound. Fifth, readers learn to break a word into beginning, middle and ending sounds.

Phonics on the other hand breaks into phonemes in which in our 26-letter alphabet there are 44 phonemes. Phonemes can be broken down into vowels (ex. a,e,i,o,u, and  sometimes y & w) and constants (ex. s,r,t,g,h,j,k,l, and sometimes y &w). There are two kinds of combinations of constants: constant blends (ex: Blends) and constant diagraph (ex: ph for f). Vowels are more complicated than constants with two types also. They are diagraphs (ex: nail) and diphthongs (ex: moon).  In addition, phonics can be broken down into phonograms. Phonograms break down into onset and rimes. Lastly phonics can be broken down into just phonic rules. For example, there are two sounds for c and g, CVC pattern, CVCe pattern, ending –igh, r-controlled words, and words that begin with kn- or wr-.

Research indicates that success, as a reader is largely dependent upon his or her ability to identify and manipulate sounds before they begin to read. A little bit of time and energy invested in phonemic awareness and phonics activities will yield great returns as children’s begin to read. When looking at how children develop as readers, there are three steps. The first is becoming an emergent reader who might pretend to read and gain a sense in what is in a story. Emergent readers then emerge into beginning readers. Beginning readers read word by word which leaders to a fluent reader who reads to gain comprehension and make inferences on a text.