Learning About Phonemes

		This is the second lesson in the Online Academy module Beginning Word Reading. In Lesson 1, The Development of literacy: As Reading Instruction Begins, you learned about some of the biological and environmental factors that can influence an individual's literacy development. You also learned about how parents and educators can develop the types of language rich environments that can promote students' literacy development. Finally, you learned about the features of effective reading interventions for learners who may be at-risk for or have already been identified as having a reading disability.

		Each of the research-based interventions you will be learning about in this module has been shown to be more effective, than the methods they were compared with, in increasing the reading skills of students at-risk for or who have reading disabilities. As powerful as any one of these interventions may be, it is the combination of the right types of interventions, during the right time in a student's school career, and the right type of instruction that really makes the difference for individual students. For you to be able to effectively use the interventions in this module on Beginning Word Reading, you will first need to develop an explicit understanding of how our speech relates to written words. That is what this lesson is about. In this lesson, Learning About Phonemes, you will be learning why it is important that you, as a teacher of students of any age, have an understanding of the distinctive characteristics of the 39 phonemes. You will also learn how knowing about phonemes relates to teaching reading and spelling. Because phonemes are represented differently than letters in written words, we have included several charts for you to refer to when you use the glossary, and when you complete the activities and assessments. This lesson will have four segments. There will be a quick review and pre-test. Then you will learn about the 24 consonant phonemes and then 15 vowel phonemes. Finally, there will be a short review and post-test.

		Because being an active learner helps you to process and remember what you are learning, we have included an interactive outline for you to complete as you go through this lesson. We know that when students paraphrase what they are hearing in a presentation, they retain much more information. The interactive outline follows the same format as the general outline for this lesson, but it has been formatted for you to fill in more specific details. The other handouts are phoneme charts that should be helpful to you in your teaching. Be warned, once you go through this lesson, you may never hear words in quite the same way as you did before.

Beginning Word Reading