Phonemic awareness skills by age*

3 yrs	Nursery rhymes; hearing alliteration and identifying words that rhyme
4 yrs	Identifying and producing rhyming words; clapping syllables; segmenting sentences into words/counting the number of words in a sentence
5 yrs	Identifying words that do not rhyme within a group; blend together onsets and rimes followed by phoneme blending. Focus on blending at this level.
6 yrs	Blending sounds together to create words; segmenting sounds (beginning/middle/end) to identify parts of words (phoneme isolation)
6-7 yrs	Counting sounds in words; identifying individual sounds in a word (phoneme segmentation); begin to spell phonetically
7-8 yrs	Manipulating sounds within words (adding, deleting, and substituting beginning consonant sounds) to form new words

*Adapted from these sources: "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum", by Marilyn Jager Adams; "Equipped for Reading Success", by David Kilpatrick, Ph.D; and "Phonological and Phonemic Awareness "Cheat Sheet" from Clever Classroom (available for free on teacherspayteachers.com)

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Dyslexia and Structered Literacy: Why I fell in Love with Phonemic Awareness, by Leslie Mata

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