English Language Development

Phonological Awareness

It is critical that sufficient attention is given to developing children’s phonological awareness during
kindergarten (RF.K.2). The focus is on general phonological sensitivity early in the year as children
engage in rhyming activities and manipulate syllables and onsets and rimes. However, phonemic
awareness becomes a systematic and important target as the year progresses. (Students who are deaf
and hard of hearing who do not have complete access to the letter-sound correspondences in English
use an alternate pathway to understanding the alphabetic code in English.)

By the end of kindergarten, children demonstrate the understandings of spoken words, syllables,
and phonemes (RF.K.2a–f) displayed in figure 3.24.

Figure 3.24. Kindergarten Standards in Phonological Awareness with Examples

Standard 2 Examples

a. Recognize and produce rhyming

words.

Recognize: They indicate that fish and dish rhyme

and that fish and plate do not.

Produce: They name words that rhyme with a target

word, saying sun or bun when asked for a word that

rhymes with run.

b. Count, pronounce, blend, and

segment syllables in spoken words.

Count: They indicate that the spoken word table has

two syllables.

Pronounce: They say the syllables in the spoken

word carpet: /car/-/pet/.

Blend: They blend the individually spoken syllables

/tea/-/cher/ to form the spoken word teacher.

Segment: They segment the spoken word tomato,

pronouncing separately its three syllables:

/to/-/ma/-/to/.

c. Blend and segment onsets and

rimes of single-syllable spoken word.

Blend: They say spin when asked to blend into a

word the separately spoken onset and rime /sp/ and

/in/.

Segment: They say /m/-/an/ when asked to say the

first sound in the spoken word man and then the

rest of the word.

d. Isolate and pronounce the initial,

medial vowel, and final sounds

(phonemes) in three-phoneme

(consonant-vowel-consonant) words.

Initial: They say /f/ when asked the first phoneme in

the orally presented word food.

Final: They say /t/ when asked the final phoneme in

the word hot.

Medial: They say /ŏ/ when asked the medial

phoneme in the orally presented word dog.

[Note: Isolating the medial vowel is more

difficult than isolating the initial or final phonemes

and generally will be addressed after children

successfully isolate initial and final phonemes.]

214 | Chapter 3 Kindergarten