Phonemic Awareness with Heggerty

As you may know, at MMCH we have a daily practice for phonemic awareness in the mornings using the Heggerty Curriculum for preschool and kindergarten age students. This curriculum is providing us everything we need to help advance through phonological and phonemic awareness lessons in a quick, effective, and fun way. Through this program, the children are gaining a strong understanding of these 8 phonological and phonemic skills:

• Rhyme

• Onset Fluency

• Phoneme Isolation

• Blend words, syllables, onset-rime, and phonemes

• Segment words, syllables, onset-rime, and phonemes

• Add words, syllables, and initial phonemes

• Delete words, syllables, and initial phonemes

• Substitute initial phonemes

Phonological Awareness is the oral and auditory study of larger portions of spoken words and sentences, including compound words, rhyming words, and more (also thought of the “chunks” of words).

Phonemic Awareness is the oral and auditory study of the smallest parts of spoken words, which encourages the child to hear and manipulate the initial, medial, and final sounds within a single word.

Phonemic awareness is one of the major parts of the science behind how children become skilled readers. The other key components of being a skilled reader are phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. We will touch on all components of the science of reading within our newsletters as we continue through the school year so you can develop a clear understanding of how children are learning about language and the process of learning to read here at MMCH.

If you’d like to start your own research into the science of reading, we urge you to read the book “Powerful Literacy in the Montessori Classroom - aligning Reading Research and Practice” by Susan Zoll, Natasha Feinberg, and Laura Saylor which gives a brief introduction to the Montessori curriculum and philosophy as a whole and then delves more deeply into the Montessori language curriculum.