Teaching Phonological Awareness

		In Lesson 1 of this module, The Development of literacy: As Reading Instruction Begins, you learned about the importance of creating an environment for strong literacy development for all students who are learning to read. In Lesson 2, Learning About Phonemes, you learned how to classify each of the 39 phonemes by its distinctive characteristics. In this lesson, Teaching phonological awareness, you are going to be learning more about how phonological awareness relates to beginning reading and spelling. You also will learn how to use specific research-based interventions to strengthen your students' phonological awareness. Before you begin this lesson, however, be sure to read the required reading, What Every Teacher Should Know about Phonological Awareness. This article will give you the background knowledge to help you understand this lesson at a deeper level.

		As most phonological awareness activities are oral activities with frequent student-teacher interactions, the audio presentation for this module includes several mini-lessons in which you can hear a teacher working with three students on the interventions that you will be learning about. By listening to these mini-lessons, you will be able to get a better feel for how a teacher would actually conduct these activities in a classroom. After two of the mini-lessons, you will have an opportunity to be the teacher. You will do this by reading each of the short scripts that you print out with the handouts for this lesson. Also, as in the other lessons, there is a student outline for you to use to take more detailed notes. Be sure to print out the handouts if you want to use this note-taking guide.

		Just to let you know, for recording purposes we worked with only three students; however, most of these activities can be used with one student at a time or with larger groups. The number of students you choose to work with will depend upon the number of students that need to work on a particular skill and your ability to monitor your students to make sure all students are doing the activity correctly. The types of activities you will be learning about in this lesson will give you a good foundation for teaching phonological awareness. Once you complete this lesson, you may want to look at, or obtain, one or more of the research-based and research-informed curriculum guides that are described in a handout in Lesson 4. These curriculum guides will give you ideas for how you can adapt and extend the types of activities you will be learning about in this lesson. Besides using these activities during the language arts period of the day, some of the activities can be used in just a few minutes at other times in the day as well. One of the frequent comments heard from students and teachers is that these activities can be fun! So, know that you and your students can have fun while they are learning foundational skills for reading. Have fun!

Beginning Word Reading