Phonics and Phonemic Awareness sound very similar, which is why they often get confused with one another or even lumped together as the same skill. Understanding the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics, and how to utilize both for students' success, is important when teaching phonics and phonemic awareness in your classroom.
What is Phonics?
Phonics relates to the sounds that correspond with letters and letter combinations. When students learn phonics, they learn specific rules that help them to pronounce or “sound” out words and spell words in print. Explicitly teaching and practicing phonics rules can benefit students in reading fluency, comprehension, and spelling skills.
How is Phonemic Awareness Different?
Phonics and Phonemic Awareness go hand in hand, which is why many people ask this question. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify the individual language sounds in the smallest forms in spoken words, and the ability to manipulate those sounds when appropriate. Examples of phonemic awareness skills include rhyming, isolating specific sounds in words, segmentation, and identifying and counting syllables. Since these skills require lots of repetition and practice, it’s good to have a variety of activities for phonemic awareness to use with your students.
3 Fun Phonemic Awareness Activities
- Baseball - Using baseball as inspiration, teachers can divide students into teams for practicing learning phonics, phonemic awareness and phonological awareness. Teachers can project a baseball diamond on the board to track student progress in answering. Teachers could use a skill like listening to a word with a certain phonics skill and practice by writing it on a whiteboard, and then speaking the word out to the teacher when asked to share their answer. Teachers can use strikes and innings like in baseball, or they can just keep track of points earned.
- Board Game - Turn phonemic awareness practice into a board game! It’s quick and easy to draw a game board on your classroom board or a poster. The game Candyland is a good inspiration for this. For example, if your phonemic awareness goal is to practice rhyming, you could create a bunch of fill in the blank rhyme cards. Students can take turns drawing cards, and when they fill in the blank correctly, they can roll the dice and go the number of spaces they roll on the game board. The first to the finish line could get a piece of candy or get 5 free minutes to do whatever they want on their tablet or device.
- Let’s Get Talking Box - This is a quick and easy way to practice without needing to set aside the time for a full game. Teachers can use a “Let’s Get Talking Box” to practice just about any skill. To do this, teachers make different cards and put them inside a box. Students draw cards from the box and have to answer the card's instructions. For example, a card could say, “Name all the words that start with Th-” or “Say all the words that start with P-” or “How many syllables does the word ‘telegram’ have in it?” Teachers can customize and add in cards as needed depending on the skills students need to work on!
Additional Activities
In addition to the activities described above, there are many phonics and phonemic awareness online games that students can use to practice these skills at school and at home. Using fun activities like these to practice phonics and phonemic awareness will help to boost engagement and will help students to master the skills they need to become confident and capable readers. Click here for printables designed to practice these skills with your students.
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