Phonological Awareness Therapy

Reading is such an important skill to learn. It plays a big role in our daily life, whether for reading at school, or even simple things like reading a text message or the news. Most kids develop reading naturally, but some children do not. This might be because of their lack of phonological awareness. 

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Phonological awareness refers to understanding the sounds in a language and how they work together. Most children notice this when they develop language and begin to talk. They understand how sounds go together in the words they are saying. When they start to read the alphabet, they can connect sounds to letters naturally. However, for some children this does not come so easily. 

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These children may require step-by-step instruction which does not always happen in preschool. This results in children getting left behind, not wanting to read and feeling embarrassed that they cannot read as well as their peers. However, this does not mean that they can't learn!

Some of the components of phonological awareness include: 

• matching letters with the sounds they make (phonics)

• learning to identify words that rhyme and then making their own rhymes

• identifying the beginning sound of words 

• blending sounds together to form a word 

• segmenting sounds to break down a word into syllables 

• changing letters in a word to make a new word 

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Children with dyslexia, slow readers and even children with spoken language delays usually benefit from phonological awareness training.