When it comes to data collection in the early elementary classroom, phonological awareness assessments are essential! Even though many phonics assessments include a section on phonological awareness, it can be invaluable to use a progress monitoring tool that is specific to these important foundational skills. Keep reading to see why!
What is Phonological Awareness?
If you’ve ever done a tiling project before, you know how important that first row of tile can be! Since the rest of the tiles are spaced in relation to each other, one small issue with spacing in the first row can become a much bigger issue with each subsequent row.
This reminds me a lot of phonics instruction! When students have difficulty with reading or writing, we might focus solely on the fluency or spelling errors right in front of us. In reality, the cause for difficulty often lies in that “first row” of literacy: Phonological awareness.
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and work with the parts of a spoken word. This starts with the ability to recognize whole words, then moves onto word parts like syllables, and ends with the individual sounds in a word (phonemes). When students have a strong foundation of phonological awareness, it is much easier for them to make the transition to decoding and encoding written text.
The Importance of Phonological Awareness Assessments
It’s important to regularly assess young students in phonological awareness to make sure that their foundation is ready for future phonics instruction. You can use assessments to identify specific areas of phonological awareness that are giving your students trouble. Then you can address those areas of difficulty with targeted, explicit instruction.
With so many assessments to administer each year, it might be tempting to skip assessments for these early literacy skills. After all, many phonological awareness skills are likely addressed by your district’s ELA curriculum! Plus, on the surface, most students are comfortable with basic phonological awareness. However, difficulty in even just one of these foundational skills can cause future challenges in reading and writing. You can get ahead of this by administering regular assessments!
Phonological Awareness Skills
Let’s take a look at some of the phonological awareness skills that you can monitor with assessments:
1. Print Concepts
Students need to understand the concept of the spoken word and how it relates to print. For example, knowing whether something they have heard is a letter or a word.
Your ELA curriculum will likely have you teaching letter identification skills alongside phonological awareness, especially in kindergarten. You can monitor the development of these skills by incorporating these print concepts into your early literacy assessments. This is a great way to keep track of student progress as they work their way through letter and sound identification.
2. Syllables
Phonological awareness begins at the word level, where students listen for compound words and syllables. You can assess this with many different assessments that focus on skills like substitution, deletion, blending, and segmenting.
For example, if students are given the word “pancake” and are asked to repeat the word without “pan”, could they say “cake”? If they hear a two-syllable word, can they verbally segment it into the two parts? These are the types of skills that you can track using phonological assessments.
3. Onset-Rime
Once students have had a chance to practice word parts, it’s time to break things down even further by separating syllables into onset and rime. The onset is anything before vowel in the syllable and the rime is the vowel and remaining sounds. For example, if a student hears the one-syllable word “lamp”, could they separate it into the onset /l/ and rime /amp/?
You can assess students on their ability to identify onset and rime as well as blending, segmenting, and substitution. All of these skills are important for phonological awareness development!
4. Phonemic Awareness
The next step in phonological awareness is working with sounds at the phoneme level. Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up words. It’s very important for students to be able to blend and segment these phonemes, because it’s an essential skill for reading and writing. For example, after hearing the word “cat” spoken aloud, can a student split it into three phonemes: /c/ /a/ /t/? Could they blend the phonemes /sh/, /i/, and /p/ into the word “ship” after hearing them spoken individually?
Students can also manipulate phonemes in words through adding and deleting sounds at different positions in each word. All of these are important phonemic awareness skills to monitor through regular assessments!
5. Spelling
Since it’s not uncommon to teach phonics right alongside phonological awareness, you can monitor how students are able to bridge that gap by administering spelling assessments. You can see how well students are able to represent sounds with written letters.
Understanding the phoneme-to-grapheme relationship is a key skill for learning how to read! You can start with letter dictation assessments and then move on to specific phonics patterns.
Printable Phonological Awareness Assessments
Would you like to do more tracking of phonological awareness development in your classroom? Be sure to check out the Phonological Awareness Assessment Toolkit I’ve put together for early elementary teachers! This progress monitoring tool has everything you need to administer phonological awareness assessments in your classroom. It includes picture cards to keep your students engaged in the oral assessments, along with all of the data collection sheets and assessment instructions you’ll need.
These assessments aren’t designed to be administered in one sitting. Instead, you can start at the student’s current level and move up or down as needed. This will help you collect the data you need in less time so you can move on to your instructional planning.
If you’d like to take a closer look at everything included in this toolkit of phonological awareness assessments, you can find it in my TPT store.
Save These Phonological Awareness Assessments
Be sure to save this post so you can come back to it later! Just add the pin below to your favorite teaching board on Pinterest. You’ll be able to quickly find these tips and resources when you’re looking for a way to assess and support your beginning readers in phonological awareness.
