Phonemic Awareness

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is a child’s ability to hear and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. These sounds are called phonemes. Children develop this skill through listening, speaking, and thinking about how sounds come together in words.

Hoot teaches phonemic awareness through four closely connected skills. Each one builds on the previous, helping children develop flexible control over sounds in words.

Phoneme Segmentation (pulling sounds apart)

In phoneme segmentation, your child hears a whole word and then breaks it into its individual sounds.

For example: step → /s/ /t/ /e/ /p/

This helps children understand that words are made up of ordered sounds, not just letters.

Phoneme Blending (putting sounds together)

Phoneme blending is the opposite process. Your child hears individual sounds and blends them together to make a word.

For example: /a/ /t/ → at

Blending teaches children how sounds work together smoothly to form words.

Phoneme Deletion (taking a sound away)

Phoneme deletion asks children to remove one sound from a word and say what word remains.

For example: tent without /t/ → ten

This is a more complex skill that combines segmentation and blending. Children learn to hold sounds in their mind, remove one, and then blend the remaining sounds into a new word.

Phoneme Substitution (changing one sound)

Phoneme substitution is the most advanced of the four skills. Children remove one sound and replace it with a new one to make a different word.

For example: change the /c/ in cat to /h/ → hat

What Phonemic Awareness Lessons Might Look Like

In a phonemic awareness lesson, your child’s teacher will guide them through carefully structured listening and speaking activities. Lessons work through books with dots to help children track sounds visually by pointing or tapping with their Hoot App Magic Finger.

Teachers emphasize sounds, not letter names, and help children pay close attention to each sound from the beginning to the end of a word. Teachers model every step clearly and provide support when a skill feels challenging.

Why this Skill Matters

At Hoot, phonemic awareness instruction helps children understand that:

Words are made up of individual sounds
Sounds can be pulled apart, put together, removed, or changed
Changing one sound can change a whole word

These skills help children understand how spoken words work and helps prepare them for successful decoding and word reading later on.