If you are familiar at all with the terms “Science of Reading” or “Structured Literacy,” I am sure that you know one of its biggest buzzwords is phonological awareness: the awareness of and ability to work with sounds in spoken language.

 As a Kindergarten teacher and former first-grade teacher, bringing phonological awareness into my classroom was one of the first shifts I made as I began my structured literacy journey. However, over the past couple of years, I have learned that not all phonological tasks are equal.

In this post, I’m going to share my experience as a Kindergarten teacher, sifting through the research and ideas presented by Mark Seidenberg, Linnea Ehri, David Kilpatrick, and Selenid Gonzalez-Frey. These researchers have affected my classroom practice the most these past two years.

When I first began implementing phonemic awareness in my classroom, I bought myself a copy of the Primary Grades Heggerty phonemic awareness program.  It was simple to use, and it was a great starting point for someone like me, who wasn’t doing any phonemic awareness at all in her classroom.

Then, my own first grader struggled to learn how to read, which led me to read the book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties by David Kilpatrick. This got me even more interested in the necessity of phonemic awareness, not just phonological awareness.

Unlike Phonological Awareness, phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken language. In addition to knowledge of letter-sound relationships, students need to be able to blend and segment in order to store sight words in memory and become fluent readers.

After reading David Kilpatrick’s Equipped for Reading Success, I immediately began drilling my first graders at the phoneme level.  At this point, I was very content with my instruction. I was using Heggerty's whole group and Equipped’s 1-minute drills in my small groups. 

Fast forward to two years later, when I became much more active on Twitter and began reading the debates about “phonemic awareness in the dark” and “phonemic awareness with letters.” I was definitely intrigued and wanted to stick with the research. Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, was a proponent of using letters with PA instruction, and he caused me to adjust my instruction.  

I was also noticing the struggle that some of my kindergarten students were having with decoding CVC words. This was especially true with words that began with a stop sound (t, d, c, k, g, ch, h, etc). So, I went back into my LETRS manual and began reading more about early decoding and came across additive blending.  Simply put, additive blending is when words are “sounded out” with no stopping or pausing between the sounds. I learned about additive blending around the same time I saw a webinar from CORE Learning featuring Selenid Gonzalez Frey about connected phonation. I was hoping this was the answer to the struggles that my emerging readers were having decoding CVC words.  Basically, the scientific study concluded that:

…connected phonation training facilitated learning to decode as well as reading nonwords accurately on the transfer task compared to segmented phonation training. An error analysis suggested that breaking between phonemes caused students to forget initial phonemes during blending.

Going back to my LETRS manual, I decided to try out additive blending. In my classroom, it worked! The students who were having trouble decoding with 3 sounds, were able to decode when they blended the first 2 phonemes together and then added the 3rd sound. Here is an example of me using additive blending in my classroom. The trouble they were having was remembering the first phoneme; therefore, when it came time to blend it all together they made errors. Additive blending took that struggle right out of the equation for them.

Seeing this success last year, I knew I needed to tailor my instruction for the current 2022-2023 school year to get to the phoneme level faster.  Here’s what I did:

As we moved from task to task, I modeled Anita Archer’s “ I do, We do, You do” technique. In addition, all students respond EVERY TIME. I also follow up with students in small groups to make sure they are successful with decoding independently.