Here's why:
* Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.
* When children sound out a word, they are breaking it down into its individual sounds and then using those sounds to figure out the whole word. This is a key skill in learning to read.
Other examples of phonemic awareness activities include:
* Rhyming: Identifying words that sound alike (e.g., cat, hat, bat).
* Blending: Putting sounds together to make a word (e.g., /c/ /a/ /t/ = cat).
* Segmenting: Breaking a word into its individual sounds (e.g., cat = /c/ /a/ /t/).
* Deleting sounds: Saying a word without a specific sound (e.g., say "cat" without the /c/).
* Substituting sounds: Replacing a sound in a word with another sound (e.g., changing "cat" to "bat").