Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words.  Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work.  they must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes.

  Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in  a spoken word that makes a difference in the word's meaning.  For example, changing the first phoneme in the word hat from /h/ to /p/ changes the word from hat to pat, and so changes the meaning. 

Children can show us that they have phonemic awareness in several ways, including:

• recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound
• isolating and saying the first of last sound of a word
• combining or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word

Children who have phonemic awareness skills are likely to have an easier time learning to read and spell than children who have few or none of these skills.