[senco-forum] Phonemic Awareness

Sharon wrote:
"Phonemic Awareness is letter juggling.  Take away -c- and replace it with
-m- makes 'cat' turn to 'mat'.  This is fine if you understand and can
reproduce the phonic sound required for each letter - and - have a good
short term memory!"
It may just have been a slip of the tongue, but phonemic awareness is
phoneme manipulation - nothing to do with letters at all, at least in the
early stages. I often use counters or glass beads to represent the sounds,
and a little diagram of a train (one sound per carriage), because until the
child can identify the sounds within words, the letters are just heaping on
more confusion because there is not always a straight 1:1 correspondence
between one phoneme and one letter.
Best wishes,
Mary