Phonemic awareness, an understanding that words can be broken down into sounds, is one of the five pillars of effective reading instruction, as delineated by the 2000 National Reading Panel Report: “(Phonemic awareness) benefits not only word reading but children’s ability to read and spell for months, if not years, after the training has ended.” It is an important part of the PAF Reading Program and is explicitly taught, modeled, and practiced under a teacher’s supervision in every lesson.

Because PAF is a reading program, the majority of phonemic awareness skills are taught in conjunction with the letters, rather than as isolated skills. Phonemic awareness has its strongest impact on reading when it is taught with the letters that represent the sounds. Of course, once you have linked phonemic awareness training with teaching the letters of the alphabet, you are teaching phonics. A well-designed phonics reading program embeds phonemic awareness training in its reading and spelling instruction.

Research also supports the efficacy of focusing the bulk of phonemic awareness instruction on the specific skills that transfer directly to reading and spelling—blending sounds into words, and segmenting words into their individual sounds. These two phonemic awareness skills, blending and segmenting, are practiced every day in the PAF Program. Children learn and practice blending sounds by reading word lists aloud to their teacher and segmenting sounds as they spell dictated words on paper.

Here are the phonemic awareness tasks, adapted from Susan Brady’s 2020 work, that are embedded in the PAF Reading Program.