How can I help children with poor phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness has the strongest effect on word reading skills when combined with teaching children the GPCs (Brady, 2020). Keep teaching Phase 2 and ensure children with poor phonemic awareness get extra practice:

• Use the Rhyme time plans and Tuning into sounds games.
• Incorporate oral blending into your everyday classroom routines. Download the ‘Oral blending in Reception’ guidance.
• Children who find oral blending tricky may find teacher-led blending easier as the graphemes provide a scaffold. (Watch the ‘How to’ video ‘Teacher-led blending’.)

Read more about how you can support children who are finding it hard to master blending in our blog Everybody blend!