Phonemic awareness is one aspect of phonological awareness and it refers to the skill of working with individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. This includes blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, and deleting and playing with the sounds in spoken words.

Phonics refers to knowledge of letter sounds and the ability to apply that knowledge in decoding unfamiliar printed words.

During reading, assess children’s phonemic awareness by encouraging them to:

identify alliteration,
identify words that have the same final phoneme,
isolate the first phoneme in words,
orally blend phonemes,
orally segment words into their component phonemes,
manipulate words by adding phonemes to, or deleting phonemes from, the beginning or end of words, and,
substitute a phoneme at the beginning of, or within a word.

Use Giglets to support with the development of phonics by exploring our phonetically restricted texts and their related 'Fun Phonics!' activities within the library. You might also encourage children to start joining in with repeated refrains of text. These include:

Pat and I
We All Play Ball
The Tree is Tall
Go to Sleep, Sloth!
Buzzy Bee
I Made a Butterfly
Bouncing
Puddle Dancer

Next steps:

The Giglets highlighting tool can be used individually or at whole class level, allowing children to interact with the text at a deeper level. Use it to: identify words that start or end with the same sound; support with blending; segment words into their component phonemes.
Using the Giglets ‘ABC Grid’ template, encourage children to locate, highlight and record key words in a text that begin or end with an identified phoneme.
Using the Giglets ‘Odd One Out’ template, challenge children to find two words beginning with same phoneme, as well as an odd one out. For further challenge, focus on phonemes at beginning of, and then at the end of words.

Early Literacy with Giglets