Teaching Phonemic Awareness

As we read in the Tompkins text, "teachers nurture children's phonemic awareness through the language-rich environments they create in the classroom" (117). The text pointed out 3 different criteria for teaching phonemic awareness, one of them being that "the instruction should be planned and purposeful, not incidental" (118). I think that this point is especially important, because it seems as if many teachers may touch on phonemic awareness during instruction, but it often seems like a side-note or someting. For example, a teacher may read a story to the class and then decide to point out the sounds of certain words or alliterations that may occur in the story. This may be good to do, but I think that actually planning this out ahead of time will result in a more effective instruction of the concept.

If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Numeroff is a book that could be used for teaching phonemic awareness. This book contains a lot of "P" words, and if planned out properly, could be an excellent way of teaching the phoneme /p/. This lesson could also incorporate the third criteria noted in Tompkins which says that "phonemic awareness activities should be...integrated with comprehension, decoding, vocabulary, writing, and spelling activities" (118). I'm sure there are numerous ways to include all (or just some) of these concepts into a well-planned lesson.