PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS: WORD AWARENESS

Welcome to our Phonological Awareness blog series, an important series for parents and teachers that covers phonological awareness, phonological sensitivity, and phonemic awareness.

This week’s topic is the first level of Phonological Sensitivity: Word Awareness.

You can also read this information in a convenient, easy-to-print eBook. Check it out here!

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS TOPICS

Check out the other topics in this Phonological Awareness blog series:

• Phonological Awareness Overview
• Word Awareness (You are here)
• Syllable Awareness
• Rhyme Awareness
• Phonemic Awareness
• Phonological Awareness Games

You can also check out my Phonological Awareness playlist on YouTube for more information:

PHONOLOGICAL SENSITIVITY: WORD AWARENESS

Phonological Awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sound properties of spoken words. It can sometimes be called an “umbrella term” because it can be broken down into two separate groups:

• Phonological Sensitivity: the ability to hear and manipulate units of language larger than phonemes, including words, syllables, and rhymes

• Phonemic Awareness: the ability to hear and manipulate individual phonemes in spoken words.

Today’s topic is all about the first level of Phonological Sensitivity: Word Awareness.

WHAT IS WORD AWARENESS?

Word Awareness is the understanding that a phrase or sentence is made up of individual words. It’s also the ability to manipulate words in phrases or sentences, which includes playing with compound words.

Word awareness is the most basic level of phonological sensitivity and seems incredibly simple to us adults.

We can easily hear three separate and distinct words in the sentence, “The dog walks.”

It might take us a moment to count, but we can also hear fourteen separate and distinct words in the sentence, “Can you please stop at the store for more milk on your way home?”

But this is not as easy for our little ones, especially our youngest preschoolers.

Have you ever listened to someone speak a foreign language? If you’re unfamiliar with the speech sounds, you might have trouble distinguishing where one word ends and another begins.

That’s similar to how our little ones can struggle with word awareness.

Once they’re comfortable with the sounds of English, they’re able to hear how those sounds go together to form words, and they can pick those words out of spoken sentences.

HOW DO WE PRACTICE WORD AWARENESS IN PRESCHOOL, PRE-K, AND KINDERGARTEN?

Here are 10 fun activities to practice word awareness in preschool, pre-k, and kindergarten. Some of these activities work on Sentence Segmentation and some work on Word Manipulation.

SENTENCE SEGMENTATION ACTIVITIES:

The following activities will help your little one understand that sentences are made up of words. These games involve you saying an oral sentence…the sillier, the better! You’ll also want your little one to repeat each sentence back to you and count the number of words they heard:

• MOVE IT:
  • Say a silly sentence, such as, “The cat eats cookies,” and have your little one do an action for each word (such as squats, lunges, jumping jacks, or elbow-to-knees).

• SMASH IT:
  • Have your little one roll out multiple balls of play dough. You say a silly sentence, such as, “The duck plays soccer,” and your little one will line up the play dough balls in a row for each word they hear (from left to right). Then they will repeat the sentence, smashing one play dough ball for each word. 

• BUILD IT:
  • Say a silly sentence, such as, “The donut makes spaghetti,” and have your little one build a tower out of blocks, one block for each word. They could also use legos, unifix cubes, or magnetic tiles to build.

• HOPSCOTCH IT:
  • Draw a hopscotch board outside with sidewalk chalk. You say a silly sentence, such as “Billy Bat went ice skating,” and have your little one jump on the hopscotch board while repeating the sentence, one jump for each word.

• TAP IT:
  • Have your little one hold out their left arm straight in front of them. Say a silly sentence, such as, “The kangaroo reads,” and have them tap down their arm with their right hand.
  • They would tap at their shoulder for “The,” tap at their elbow for “kangaroo,” and at their wrist for, “reads.”

• HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES, & TOES:
  • Say a silly sentence, such as, “The dragon breathes ice,” and have your little one touch their head, shoulders, knees, and toes for each word.

• HUMAN SENTENCE:
  • If you have a small group of kids, you can have them BE the sentence!
  • Say a silly sentence, and have one student line up for each word they heard. Then have the group repeat the sentence together.

WORD MANIPULATION ACTIVITIES:

The goal of these activities is to mix up words within sentences or replace one word with another, and then have your little one listen for the changes.

• NURSERY RHYME MIX UP:
  • Tell your little one you’re going to sing a favorite nursery rhyme, but you’re going to change one of the words. Their job is to tell you which word you changed.
  • For example, if you sing, “Humpty Dumpty,”  you could change it to, “All the queen’s horses and all the queen’s men.” Then they would tell you that you changed “king” to “queen.”

• SONG SWAP:
  • Change your little one’s favorite song to include different words. This is fun to do based on the theme you’re learning about in your preschool classroom or homeschool, or just based on what interests your child.
    • For example, if your little one loves, “The Wheels on the Bus,” and you’re doing a farm unit, you can change it to something silly like, “The cow on the bus says moooo moooo moooo.”
    • Another example is if your little one loves, “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” and you’re doing an emotions theme, you could change it to, “If you’re mad and you know it, stomp your feet.”

COMPOUND WORDS:

And of course, don’t forget about compound words!

• COMPOUND WORDS:
  • Give your little one two words, such as “butter” and “fly” and ask them what word they can make.
    • This is great to do with pictures so they can see how a stick of butter and a fly are two separate things…but combined, the new word is butterfly!
  • You can also give them one word like “snow” and ask them if they can think of another word they can add to “snow” to make a compound word (ex: “snowman,” “snowball,” “snowflake,” etc.)

Looking for a resource that has all of these games included in it? Check out my Phonological Awareness Sound Games! I’ve created games to go along with all the holidays and seasons.

WORD AWARENESS ON YOUTUBE

Want to see a video explaining this topic? Head to my YouTube channel to watch my Word Awareness video:

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS E-BOOK

Would you rather have this information as a PDF download so you don’t have to navigate to all the different pages on my website? Check out my Phonological Awareness eBook and save yourself time!

If these word awareness activities are helpful to you, let me know! You can comment below or find me on Instagram (@littleslovelearningblog).

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Happy Learning!