The 2 Pillars of Success

Pillar 1 - Phonological Awareness

Phonological Awareness, plays a foundational role in shaping your child's literacy journey.

Phonological Awareness is an auditory skill that encompasses the ability to focus on the sounds of speech and understand the various ways speech can be broken down into smaller parts. In the context of early reading, it involves the hearing and saying of words, making it the fundamental building block in a child's journey toward literacy.

Recognised as a key competency for both emerging and proficient readers, phonological awareness sets the stage for accurate and fluent word-level reading proficiency. 

Dr David Kilpatrick, a prominent figure in literacy research, identifies phonological awareness as the single most important factor in differentiating struggling from successful readers.

He emphasises that tasks involving the manipulation of phonemes are the best predictors of word-level reading proficiency. 

It is clear, a strong competency in phonological awareness is crucial for your child's successful journey into reading!

Key Aspects of Phonological Awareness:

1. Understanding Onset-Rime, Syllables, and Rhyme: Children develop an awareness of the beginning sounds of words (onset), the remaining part of the word (rime), and the structure of syllables and rhyme.

2. Phonemic Awareness - A Vital Sub-skill: An essential element of phonological awareness and includes the isolation of individual sounds within a word, blending these sounds together to form a word, segmenting sounds in a word, and manipulating these sounds to create new words (deletion, substitution, addition).

Pillar 2 - Speech to Print

The Speech to Print component of Reading Readiness is a bonus inclusion that is introduced after a child has demonstrated a strong grasp of all aspects of phonological awareness, especially phonemic awareness.

This is a pivotal prerequisite as, before delving into letters, a child must identify individual sounds and successfully blend, segment, and manipulate these sounds.

Educational experts emphasise the importance of understanding and learning from speech to print, as this approach contributes to a more comprehensive and logical grasp of the English language, facilitating a smoother transition to reading and writing.

By bridging the gap between spoken sounds and written words, Speech to Print aims to set the stage for confident and capable reading!

The combination of Phonological Awareness and Speech to Print within the Reading Readiness program ensures that your child not only hears and understands the sounds of speech but also comprehends the intricate relationship between spoken and written language, fostering a comprehensive and effective approach to early reading success.

Digital Training & Hands-on Multisensory Kit

Get exclusive access to a collection of online training videos!

These videos are a valuable resource, featuring both informational content and practical demonstrations to guide you through each activity with your child.

These videos showcase me actively engaging with a young child, providing you with a genuine and realistic portrayal of how the activities come to life.

These demonstrations are designed to offer clarity and support, ensuring you feel confident and empowered as you embark on this educational journey with your child.

Beyond the digital realm, your Reading Readiness kit includes a treasure trove of resources, from bingo and game boards, sound cards, wiki sticks, whisper phone, unifix cubes, magnetic letters, and a magnetic whiteboard. All neatly packaged in a hard case for easy storage.

Level 1 - Rhyme

In this level you will teach your child to identify phonological similarities in spoken word pairs; that is, hearing similarities in word endings.

This concept is important because rhyming will teach your child how language works and help them to notice and work with the sounds within words.

Rhyming activities will also help your child to make predictions when listening to nursery rhymes or rhyming books that you read them.

Rhyming can also be fun and beneficial in developing the rhythm of language which is a starting point of using expression.

Level 2 - Alliteration

Alliteration is another component of phonological awareness.

It is similar to rhyming, and is important because it helps emerging readers predict what comes next and join in with reading.

Your child will begin to pay close attention to the sounds that certain letters make when grouped together.

When your child begins to hear and recognise words that start with the same sound, they are learning to isolate phonemes, which is an important part of the early reading process.

Did you know that many Dr Seuss books use alliteration creating sentences that just roll off the tongue and are fun to listen to.

Level 3 - Syllables

Working on syllables will help your child recognise that words have different parts. We could describe syllables of a word as the beats in a word and, as with the previous activities, this is an auditory skill.

For example, the word cup has one syllable, or one beat. The word cupcake has 2 syllables, or two beats.

Approximately 80% of words in English have more than one syllable, making it an important concept to understand.

Being able to divide words into smaller chunks and blending the chunks together speeds up the process of decoding which creates more fluent readers.

After all it is much easier to read an unfamiliar word in chunks than to read it as one continuous string and that is because smaller chunks of words are easier to remember in our short-term memory rather than remembering all the single sounds in a word.

Level 4 - Onset-Rime

Onset-Rime involves breaking words into their onset and their rime.

But what is an onset and rime?

The Onset – is the initial phonological unit of any word- which contains the initial consonant or consonant blends. Not all words have onsets.

The Rime is the string of letters that follow the onset, which contains the vowel and any final consonants.

In the word cat, /c/ is the onset, and /at/ is the rime. In the words cat,, hat, sat, mat, the common feature is that they all have the same rime at the end.

This activity will help your child hear sounds in words. Being able to do this and recognise common phonetic sounds is the foundation for developing strong reading skills.

Level 5 - Phoneme Investigation

Phoneme investigation is the first activity within Phonemic awareness – remember the crucial element of phonological awareness!

Without this base understanding of sounds, phonics (which is taught at a later stage) makes little sense.

Hearing sounds, differences in sounds and reproducing them is fundamental to mapping speech to print.

This activity will help your child learn how to correctly say speech sounds  through hearing games, and understand that sounds come together to make words.

Level 6 - Phoneme Identity

Phoneme identity is another component of Phonemic awareness.

It is having an awareness of the sounds that make up words and is critical to being able to blend sounds together for later reading.

This activity will help your child identify words that begin with the same sound. You may like to use the same resources to have your child identify words that have the same ending sound too.

Level 7 - Phoneme Segmentation

Segmenting words into individual sound units enables children to focus on the basic elements that make up spoken language.

It is the process of splitting words up into their phonemes – pulling them apart - and builds upon onset-rime.

This activity will help your child to identify how many sounds are in a word and the order of those sounds.

Level 8 - Phoneme Blending

Blending is the opposite of segmenting and involves the ability to merge isolated phonemes you hear, together to make words.

Whereas segmenting was pulling apart the sounds, think of blending as pushing together the sounds to form words.

This activity will help your child build words from individual sounds by blending single sounds together in a sequence.

Level 9 - Phoneme Manipulation

Phoneme Manipulation build on segmenting and blending. It is the process of modifying, changing, or moving the individual sounds in a word to make a new word.

It builds phonemic awareness and helps students learn words they don’t know and ultimately helps them with both reading and spelling.

This activity will help your child learn addition, deletion and substitution of phonemes.

Reading researcher Dr David Kilpatrick states that  - “Phonological manipulation tasks are the best measures of the phonological awareness skills needed for reading because they are the best predictors of word-level reading proficiency"

BONUS Level 10 - Speech to Print

Speech to print, which may also be called Phonics instruction, teaches the relationship between the sounds of spoken language and the letters of written language.

This process is not just about teaching children to spell words – it is much more than that!

It is a powerful form of reading instruction and the process involved in speech to print has a great impact on orthographic learning through orthographic mapping which is the process of mapping sounds to letters to spell the spoken word in written form.

Having good phonological awareness and working from speech to text, eliminates your child relying on guess work to read.