How Do You Improve A Childs Phonological Awareness Skills?
Phonological awareness is the ability to understand, distinguish and manipulate the sounds of the English language. These sounds are broken down into syllables (/dog/ and /house/ in /doghouse/), rimes (/d/ in dog and /h/ in house) and onsets (/og/ in dog and /ouse/ in house) and phonemes (/o/ in dog or /s/ in house). Read, read, read to your child from infancy on. Sing and chant nursery rhymes, tongue twisters and simple songs together as often as possible. Teach what a rhyme is and encourage your child to try to make up his/her own. About the age of three, kids can begin to understand rhyming and make up their own rhymes. This prepares your child to deal with onsets and rimes. Emphasize what sounds letters make. As your child gets more comfortable identifying letters, talk about the name of a letter and also the sound it makes. This prepares your child to deal with phonemes. Clap the syllables to familiar words. Teach your child to make one clap per syllable. Practice sentence segment
