Episode 305: Navigating the Science of Reading Part 6: Phonological Awareness

So we're going to unpack what phonological awareness involves , why it's crucial , even for middle school students , and how you can incorporate it into your poetry lessons . So , from sound patterns and rhymes to fun classroom activities , we've got some great ideas to make phonological awareness in your classroom so much fun for your middle school students .

All right , let's dive into this episode and after this one , make sure that you go check all of the other Science of Reading episodes that we've recorded . We have five other ones in this series and we have a couple more coming your way the rest of this month . All right , you guys , let's enjoy this episode .

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So this is actually the sixth episode in our series and today Megan and I are talking about phonological awareness .

And that's really the first episode of this whole series . But today's topic can really help any teacher . Regardless of whether you've listened to the first five episodes of our series or if your school even follows the science of reading , it's going to have some great information .

So the prior episodes in this series were based on strands from the language comprehension section of Scarborough's Reading Rope . That is a tongue twister .

For some middle school teachers , though , this word recognition section can seem more like something that elementary school teachers focus on , because this section is all about the act of physically reading isolating sounds , putting sounds together , decoding words , recognizing words .

You get the idea , but even if your middle school students are reading on level , this is actually really important for them too . So today we're addressing phonological awareness , and phonological awareness is the ability to hear and work with the sounds in spoken language , and research shows that poor phonological awareness is a major cause of reading difficulties .

That's not a surprise , right , but this actually includes two main skills phonological sensitivity and phonemic awareness . Phonological sensitivity and phonemic awareness no-transcript , while phonemic awareness focuses on the smallest sounds in speech .

And I feel like I am just hyper aware of all of this right now because my youngest daughter , harper she's five years old , she's in kindergarten and she's learning to read , and it's like every night she comes home .

I actually brought her little things , megan , look at her sight word fluency pyramid , her little fluency alphabet chart Cool , she brings those home with her every single day and she practices and it's like wild to watch her and I just think it's the coolest thing .

Like I keep telling Daryl , my husband , about this and I think part of it is when Jameson , our oldest , was in kindergarten , harper was a newborn , davey was three . Like it was all a blur , so I didn't really like pay attention to what he was learning in school with in terms of reading .

And then when Davey was in kindergarten , it was like the middle of COVID and same thing . And now I have like a bit more space in my life and to like actually watch Harper and how her little brain processes all this is like the coolest thing . It's amazing , it's amazing stuff that they do .

Like they are , they are amazing and side note everyone , megan is back in the classroom and teaching not teaching kindergarten , but teaching kindergartners during the day and pre-K right , I do have pre-K freaking out she's doing music with all different grade levels and I'm just like , oh my goodness , and you know what's really cool , to the processing point of , like

a five-year-old , like we've been doing different rhymes in Spanish and like they don't know what these words mean , but they can pick up on these sounds and like save these rhymes in Spanish and it's the coolest thing to watch . So it's very , very fun , very fun .

Okay , so we're going to move on to big units , and this is like talking about words and syllables . And little units are like individual sounds and so , for reference , we call those individual sounds phonemes , and I think , jessica , you're going to share a little bit more about that .

And Megan , you kind of just alluded to this how you're doing that with your students in Spanish , and we're going to take that same concept of rhyming and bring it into poetry . So Megan's going to walk you through a few ways that you can help students develop their phonological awareness while reading and writing poems .

So this can include poems with a rhyme scheme or lines with assonance , consonance and alliteration . So simple internet searches can lead you to some great ones , and what you're basically looking for is repeated sounds or emphasis . Then here are just a few things you can do in the classroom . Don't try to address them all in one lesson .

Please Just pick a few , or just one or a few of these ideas to include the next time your class is working with poetry . So the first idea is to identify and highlight sound patterns . So have students simply identify and highlight examples of assonance , consonance and or alliteration in poems that they find . This helps them focus on the sound units in words .

The next idea is rhyme recognition and creation , so you can encourage students to find rhyming words in poems and come up with their own rhyming pairs , and this really strengthens their ability to hear and work with similar sounds .

Next , funny poem revisions have students replace the rhyming words in a poem with new rhyming pairs and read out their funny new poems to the class . They'll love that part , guaranteed Right .

This helps students become more aware of the rhythmic structure of language , and that's a lot of what we're doing in music is like clapping the rhythm of the words , so it goes right along with that . Next idea is onset and rhyme activities .

So you break words in poems into their onset , and that's just simply the initial sound , and then rhyme , which is the rest of the word , to help students really see the patterns in sound . Next idea is write sound-focused poems . So you can assign students to write their own poems that include specific sound devices like alliteration or consonants .

This really encourages them to play with sounds creatively . Alliteration or consonants this really encourages them to play with sounds creatively . Another idea is to write poems with a rhyme pattern .

So you can have students identify the rhyme pattern of a poem that you're reading and write their own that follows that same pattern , and this helps them to just improve their understanding of how words and sounds interact with each other and then they develop their ability to manipulate language creatively . Next , read aloud for sound is another idea .

Have students read poems aloud , verbally , emphasizing the sounds , the rhymes and the patterns they hear , and this really reinforces the connection between written and spoken language .

Next idea is to create a sound collage . You can have students create a collage of images and share sounds . These can be beginning , middle or end sounds , vowels or consonants , whatever you'd like them to focus on .

For an extra challenge here , you could have students create rhyming pairs that share sounds , then challenge students to create a poem with all of these words . This is just a creative way to kind of help students pay attention to sound and incorporate these concepts into their writing , of course . And then finally , you could have students create sound maps .

So let students create visual maps of the sound patterns they notice in a poem , and this could be like highlighting alliteration in one color and assonance in another color , for example . They could also draw images of words that rhyme or share sounds . This activity really helps students kind of visually and creatively engage with the sound elements of a poem .

It really kind of deepens their understanding of how sound patterns contribute to the overall effect of the poem .

It's so much fun . And we would find all the different rhymes in there . We would focus on the adjectives , like it was just so much you could do with that poem . And now , whenever I , you know , hear that poem these days with my own kids , it just brings me back to fifth grade . And then I was thinking with the what was it ?

The let's see , it was the right sound focused poems . So that's where students write their own poems . And he'd had this like random memory of my brother popping into my head when he was in middle school and he had to write a poem like this and he was like I don't know , I don't want to do this .

And I was like I'll help you , cause whatever , I liked that kind of stuff . And I still remember the title of his poem was Ode to the Otter Pop .

But I'm curious , megan , like okay , so you do these activities or maybe you know one or two of them with your students . Do you think it's really important to teach your students then , like this is what assonance is , this is what consonance is , or do you just like dive right into the rhymes of the poem itself ?

Like we're going to define it and we'll , you know , use the word over and over until they understand what assidence is or whatever , but if you're teaching you know high schoolers , I would absolutely think they need to know it , Right .

So , for example , if they didn't know what assonance means to know that the sound O gets repeated in the line Joe roamed the grove alone , if these terms will come up a lot in your class or if your students are at a high level , they can be good to teach , like we mentioned .

So if you're simply trying to help your students become more aware of sound , it's not required .

So Megan just shared again so many good ideas . What was that ? 10 different ideas . So I highly recommend , if one like stuck with you , go back , listen to that part again and just jot it down . Maybe jot one more down . Don't try them all , but pick the one that resonates with you and that you think will work well with your students .

So these simple poetry activities can really help students become more aware of the sounds of language , which really is so important for reading . So that's it for this episode , but please join us next week when we tackle another word recognition concept and that's the skill of decoding . So we will see you next week .

Have a great week with your students , everyone , and we'll talk to you soon . Bye , everybody .