The Building Blocks of Reading

The Building Blocks
of Reading

Reading doesn’t happen all at once; it’s built on key skills that children develop over time. Two of the most important building blocks of reading are phonemic awareness and phonics. These skills lay the foundation for fluent reading and are essential for your child’s long-term success as a reader.

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds, or phonemes, in words. For example, if you say the word “cat,” phonemic awareness allows your child to break it down into its individual sounds: /k/, /a/, and /t/. This skill is critical because before children can connect letters to sounds, they need to be able to recognize the sounds in spoken words.

What Is Phonics?

Phonics is the next step in learning to read. It teaches children the relationship between sounds and the letters that represent them. Once a child can identify sounds, phonics helps them understand how those sounds are written. For example, they learn that the /b/ sound is represented by the letter “B.” Phonics instruction is crucial because it helps children decode unfamiliar words, which leads to better reading fluency.

Two Activity Ideas to Build Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Skills

Sound Stretching Game Say a word, like “dog,” and encourage your child to stretch the word out, saying each individual sound slowly: /d/ – /o/ – /g/. You can have fun with this by pretending the word is stretchy like a rubber band. This activity helps children hear each phoneme in the word and understand that words are made up of smaller sounds.
Letter-Sound Bingo Create a simple bingo card with letters in each square. Call out a sound (like /s/ or /m/) and have your child place a marker on the letter that makes that sound. You can make this game more fun by using small toys or treats as markers. This game strengthens both phonemic awareness and phonics by connecting sounds to their corresponding letters.