A Note On Phonemic Awareness

A Sound Beginning is an assessment of phonological awareness at four different levels: Word Level, Syllable Level, Onset-Rime Level, and Phoneme Level. Phonological awareness is the manipulation of sounds in spoken language and is an important building block for reading. The assessment is administered orally that would include the student tapping, deleting, segmenting, and blending different sounds. Felipe’s score for each level is as follows:

Furthermore, the DIBELS Next is comprised of 7 subtests which include: First Sound Fluency (FSF), Letter Naming Fluency (LNF), Phoneme Segmentation Fluency (PSF), Nonsense Word Fluency

We will assess this skill using The Phonological Awareness Profile by Robertson and Salter, a criterion-referenced assessment (1995). Criterion-referenced assessments are not used to compare students’ performance with each other, but rather to evaluate the student’s mastery in a specified subject. Such tests are designed to provide information for instruction as well. Only the phonological awareness subtest will be administered to Chloe. This subtest has the following tasks: rhyming, segmentation, isolation, deletion, substitution, and blending. The tasks are composed of the following:

The student read aloud will serve as a formative assessment on fluency and word recognition.

An example of phonological awareness is a child being able to recognize that “sat” and “hat” rhyme. When a child is asked what rhymes with “sat” they should be able to produce a word such as “cat”.

At this stage, students are aware of letter formation, print knowledge, how to alphabetize and phonological and phoenemic awareness as taught in Level K. New skills include segmenting words into syllables and syllables into sounds (up to 5 sounds), short and long vowels when given letters or sounds, identification of the structure of words such as blends, digraphs, base words, suffixes and syllable types including closed and vowel-consonant-e syllables. Students are expected to read and spell closed and vowel-consonant-e syllable type words, name sounds for r-controlled vowels and for vowel digraphs and vowel diphthongs, how to read and spell compound words and other words with two syllables, how to read and spell words with “s”, “es”, “ed”, and “ing” suffixes, and how to read and spell words with unexpected vowel sounds. Students will learn to read and spell words with CVC, CCVC, CVCC, CCVCC, and CVCe. They will read and spell 100 high frequency words including a list of trick words and they will read and spell targeted high-frequency, non-phonetic words. Students will begin to produce sentences using vocabulary words, will read about 60 words per minute with fluency and comprehension,

Each session, Andrew review all the sounds he has previously learned. This is a quick flash card activity where he is presented with letter(s) and is to give the sound. Andrew periodically needs to the use of the keyword to remember a welded sound (ie. ang, ong, ung). Andrew

This standard (and sub standards) was accomplished through recognition of the words with /-ill/ rime.

The tests for pre-test and post-test were similar. There were 16 words for first grade, 12 words for second grade, and 16 words for third grade. The tests were used to see the ability of the students orally say the sound and break the word into phonemes, not letters. The way of analyzing the data was following Yopp-Singer Test (1995). The students who got high scores by segmenting all the items correctly were considered as phonemically aware. The students who correctly segmented some items were considered as displaying emerging phonemic awareness. Students who were not able to segment the items correctly or none at all were included as lacking of phonemic

Richard’s performance in reading and mathematics measures his capability is multiple areas across each domain. When reading Richard has an understanding of the association of letter to sound when reading. He was able to associate letters with their proper sound with both vowel and consonants. The Dolch word list and WJ subtest 1 measured word identification, Richard decoded words and blended the sounds to read the entire word. He was able to automatically identify letters with one of two syllables with minimal hesitation. When reading DIEBELS and words in the Dolch word list, Richard was able to identify high frequency words in isolation and when reading the words within the passage. Measuring Richard’s comprehension, Richard was capable

1. Graysen uses is currently in what we call the emerging skill level for identifying initial phonemes and the low skill level for matching initial phonemes. At times Graysen shows a good understanding of initial phonemes, but sometimes he confuses initial and final phonemes. For example, one question on the assessment asked him to name the initial phoneme he heard in the word pig and his response was /g/. This is a common misconception I notice in students who are in the early stages of building their phonemic awareness. I do not see this as a problem that will continue, but should be resolved

As discussed within the lesson plan, the letters-sound correspondence th- /th/ was chosen as the focus for this lesson due to data from a previous phonics assessment and anecdotal evidence that supported the idea that many students are confusing the /th/ and /f/ sounds when spelling and pronouncing unfamiliar words. In particular, many students are substituting the /th/ or th in words for a /f/ or f – spelling the word “with” as “wif”. This lesson aligns directly with the standard CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.1.3.A (Know the spelling-sound correspondences for common consonant digraphs) and specifically works to strengthen the correspondence between th-/th/. Additionally, by learning and gaining confidence with using digraphs students work towards the standard CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.1.2.E (Spell untaught words phonetically, drawing on phonemic awareness and spelling conventions) as they begin to use these digraphs to decode and spell new words.

The student was able to speak the beginning and end sound along with breaking down the Phoneme Segmentation of each word with a struggle. They had one or no errors in the Phoneme Awareness, which shows the students ability of pronouncing a word to be able to read is on level. In addition, the student ability to listen to the words when given in the section of Knowledge of the Alphabetic Principle, shows the student has strong ability to listen to two words and make a determination of which word is beginning asked by the observer by sounding out each word.

-Phonemic Awareness: Fundations; the teacher will say a word out loud and have the students “tap out” the sounds as they say it; for example cat: /c/-/aaaa/-/t/. Then the students write the word on a white board. They clear when the teacher instructs them to and then they move on to a new word.

The purpose of this assessment is to evaluate a student’s phonic skills, specifically in the letter name stage of phonics. The assessment allows the teacher to evaluate the phonic skills of the student in order to identify which features the student knows and which features the student needs to work on. The assessment evaluates the following phonics features initial and final consonants, initial digraphs and blends, short vowels, affricates, and final consonant blends and digraphs. In order to administer the test, the student is asked to spell a set of twenty-five words. The teacher will then use the results from the assessment to further plan instruction for the features of phonics the student struggled with.