Phonemic awareness is essential in teaching students to be automatic decoders of print. The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum provides students with consistent and repeated instruction, and this transfers to developing a student’s decoding and encoding skills.
All students participate in the lessons as part of the Tier 1 curriculum. As they grow more confident they may still be developing phonemic awareness skills and may benefit from instruction in the areas of blending segmenting, substituting, and deleting phonemes.
The lessons are designed to provide daily instruction in eight phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Students practice blending, segmenting, and manipulating words, syllables, and phonemes each day. Most literacy curriculum currently available places minimal focus on phonemic awareness, only practicing one to two skills each day.
The two best predictors of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness. (Adams, 1990) With this program, students receive daily practice in both. This explicit instruction scaffolds support for students to work with early, basic and advanced phonemic awareness skills. With daily lessons, students are able to build the necessary foundation to become automatic decoders of print.
The instruction provided throughout the daily lessons can be customised to meet the individual needs of each learner. Teachers can provide support for students through teacher modeling and kinesthetic hand motions and the students stay engaged.
Students who excel can be challenged with advanced phonemic awareness activities that focus on deleting and substituting phonemes, which will help them add new multi‐syllabic words to their sight vocabulary.
Students who have limited proficiency with the English language may benefit from phonemic awareness instruction in their native language. The focus of the lessons is on isolating sounds, blending sounds into words, and manipulating sounds, rather than vocabulary development.
Students can receive explicit instruction in sounds when working with an teacher assistant for additional support. This may be in addition to the instruction that is provided within the classroom. The teacher assistant can provide targeted instruction for specific skills and an intervention lesson may last around 5-7 minutes.
Studies have shown that phonemic awareness is a foundational skill, essential for learning to read. As students learn to identify sounds through oral and auditory activities, they become phonemically aware. Engaging in phonemic awareness instruction develops students’ understanding of sounds, and that knowledge directly impacts their spelling and writing.
First of all, you will want to take a look at what it is. You can download sample lesson plans on their website at this link. They have uploaded a sample plans. (I've been using this Pre-K book with my Transitional New Entrants.) There are also plans from the Kindergarten book and the Primary book.
Start at the Beginning of the Book- (No Matter What Time of Year You Begin)
I heard about it at a professional development course around Structured Literacy and also had a chat with our RTLit teachers.
It is designed to be used DAILY and start from Week 1 - do not skip ahead to the week you are in.
Consistency is the Key
Like many skills, consistency is the key to learning phonemic awareness, and daily practice makes the difference! I use the program consistently five days a week. It's actually quite easy to plan for! You just cross off a fifteen minute time block for the Heggerty Book Phonemic Awareness exercises, and turn the page to the next week on Fridays! lt's an easy lesson plan, no prep habit!
Keep the Pace Up
Once both you and the kids know the routine, the quicker you can take them through the exercises, the happier you'll all be! It's easier to keep the kids' attention if you keep the lesson moving than if you go slowly. The kids will get a TON of repetition on every skill, so there is no reason to dwell on each one.
Don't Stop the Lesson Once You Start
Let your class know that you will not call on them if they have questions during the lesson. If someone raises a hand to stop you to ask a question, just shake your head, "no," meaning, "Not right now- wait a few minutes." My students have gotten so good at their Heggerty phonemic awareness lessons that we usually get through them in about seven minutes, not counting singing the ABC song at the beginning and the Nursery Rhyme at the end! Below you can see an example of one of the Nursery Rhyme videos with motions that we do afterwards!
Use Consistent Hand Motions for the Exercises
The Heggerty book includes descriptions of hand motion cues to use for many of their exercises, but not all. Of course, you can always make up your own! But I would highly suggest that you be consistent with your movements. If you teach the kids to "punch the ending sound" one week, then stick with that unless there is a reason to change it. And here is a tip:
And by the way, if your kids don't know all of the letter sounds. Example of songs to do letters and sounds.
Here is an example of how the lesson plan looks like in action.
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