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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Developing and sustaining foundational language skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking--beginning reading and writing. The student develops word structure knowledge through phonological awareness, print concepts, phonics, and morphology to communicate, decode, and spell.

Ask students to segment words into syllables. They can orally demonstrate a break between syllables or identify the syllables through an action such as clapping, using fingers, or moving counters.

Example:

You are going to listen to words and tell me the syllables you hear. For example, the syllables you hear in the word butter are /but/-/ter/. Can you tell me the sounds you hear in these words?

  • candy—/can/-/dy/
  • outside—/out/-/side/
  • elephant—/el/-/e/-/phant/
  • sunset—/sun/-/set/
  • parachute—/par/-/a/-/chute/
Phonological awareness is the ability to detect and manipulate the sound structures of spoken language, including recognizing differently sized sound parts (e.g., phrases, words, syllables, phonemes) and manipulating those parts (i.e., blend, segment, delete, add, and change).
Segmenting multisyllabic words involves a student hearing a word and breaking that word apart into syllables. For example, if the student hears water, the student should be able to segment the syllables and say /wa/-/ter/.

Research

Yopp, H., & Yopp, R. (2000). Supporting Phonemic Awareness Development in the Classroom. The Reading Teacher, 54(2), 130–143. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20204888

Summary:  Yopp and Yopp describe phonemic awareness and provide ideas for activities that focus on rhyme, syllable manipulation, onset-rime manipulation, and phoneme manipulation.