Phonological Awareness Teaching Resources

Make teaching phonics easy with printable worksheets, activities, games and more designed for elementary ELA teachers.

The teaching of phonics, or phonemic awareness, helps students to understand that a letter can represent more than one sound and that a syllable must contain a vowel sound. Teaching students about phonological awareness will also help them to recognize and associate sounds of the letters of the alphabet, which will help them to improve their reading skills and efficiency. Use this extensive range of phonological awareness teaching resources, including worksheets, activities, and educational posters to develop the phonic knowledge of elementary school students.

How to Teach Phonics

OK, you probably already know that phonics is all about teaching word recognition via grapheme-phoneme associations and letter-sound correspondences.

It’s a means of teaching early readers the pieces that make up a word so they can blend them together to decode the English language as readers and writers.

The English language system is one of the hardest to teach and learn, so how do you teach phonics? Let’s start with the phonics vocabulary.

• For starters, there are 26 letters that create approximately 44 phonemes, the word for the individual speech sounds that make up words. Put together, phonemes make words. OK, easy enough, right?
• Well, these phonemes can be written in over more than 200 different letter combinations, known as graphemes. Graphemes can be made up of 1 letter (such as “p” in “pig”), 2 letters (such as “gh” in ghost), 3 letters (such as “igh” in night), or 4 letters (such as “ough” in rough).
• Then there are digraphs or two letters that work together to make one sound — such as “ph” in graph. But wait, isn’t that a grapheme? Yup, a digraph is a type of grapheme.
• So is a trigraph, trigraphs, aka three letters that work together to make one sound, such as “dge” in edge.
• And if you’re teaching phonics, you can’t forget dipthongs, the name for a sound that is formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable, such as “ou” in loud.

Most kids will spend kindergarten, first, and even second grade getting a handle on all the elements of phonics.