Discover engaging word awareness activities, teaching tips and strategies for this basic phonological awareness skill. This blog post is a practical guide to developing word awareness through playful, hands-on strategies. Perfect for kindergarten, preschool, and first-grade teachers looking to teach the concept of a word.
Word awareness is a key part of phonological awareness. It's about knowing that sentences are made up of individual words. Even though children hear and use words all the time, it doesn't automatically mean they understand what a word is or can tell where one word ends and another begins.
Have you ever listened to someone speaking a foreign language? It's hard to figure out where one word stops and the next starts. Is it one long word or two separate ones? This confusion is something our kids sometimes feel in our phonological awareness lessons.
For a child’s awareness of words to develop, word awareness needs to be explicitly taught. There are lots of ways to do this in our classrooms.
Interested in teaching this important phonological awareness skill?
In this blog post, we will explore what word awareness is and how to teach it. I’ll also share my tried and tested activities and give you example lessons to follow. Your students will have a well-developed awareness of words in no time!
Phonological awareness is the ability to recognise that words are made up of a variety of sound units.
As children develop phonological awareness they begin to learn
Phonological awareness is about understanding and manipulating the sound structures of our spoken language. It is an auditory and oral language skill that plays a critical role in literacy development. There is research suggesting it is actually a strong predictor of later success in reading and spelling.
Phonological awareness is a broad umbrella term covering four subskills:
Many educators confuse phonemic awareness and phonological awareness. The primary difference lies in the size of the speech sound unit you are working with.
Phonological awareness activities involve spoken sentences, words and syllables.
Phonemic awareness activities are at the phoneme level and work with the 44 speech or letter sounds.
Interested in learning more about phonological awareness? Learn practical teaching ideas and engaging activities to develop phonological and phonemic awareness literacy skills here in this blog post: Teaching Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness
The first and most basic level of phonological awareness is word awareness. This is where children start to hear individual words within a sentence. We are working at the word level here.
There are five levels within the skills of sound and word discrimination.
Sound discrimination activities are important phonemic awareness activities. If you are working on developing phonemic awareness skills, you will want to head over to this blog post: 9 Practical Fun and Easy Sound Discrimination Activities
My sound discrimination blog post is all about teaching kids to listen and really pay attention. There are nine practical auditory or sound discrimination games and activities for you in that blog post. It deals with phonemic awareness skills.
This blog post on word awareness deals with phonological awareness skills.
Word awareness is the most basic level of phonological sensitivity and involves recognising that a sentence or phrase is made up of individual words. Children with strong word awareness can easily identify where one word ends, and another begins when listening to spoken language. They can also separate individual words when reading and writing.
Word awareness is an important skill for children to develop because it helps them to understand the structure of language. It allows them to recognise patterns in words, such as rhyming words and compound words.
Children with strong word awareness are also better able to learn new words because they can break them down into smaller parts and understand their meaning. They understand that our spoken language is made up of sentences and that these sentences are made up of separate, individual words.
When children have word awareness, they can isolate words within sentences, manipulate these words, and track the word sequences in sentences. These skills are essential for sentence segmentation and word manipulation. These skills also help students see that sentences are constructed from individual words.
Word awareness is so important in reading and writing. Understanding where one word ends and the next begins is the first step in breaking down language into manageable parts.
For Reading: Students need word awareness to decode words. They need to be able to break words into smaller chunks, like syllables and sounds, for effective decoding. If students don’t have word awareness, this task would be impossible.
For writing: Students need word awareness if they are to write coherent sentences. They need to be able to recognise words and appropriately space them. Not that my students have got this yet. “Where are your finger spaces?” seems to be on repeat in my classroom 🤣
To teach word awareness, here are a few teaching strategies and tips I use in my classroom:
While word awareness is an important semantic language skill, it's worth noting that it is less directly predictive of reading success than other phonological skills.
However, recognising words as separate units in spoken language is a precursor to reading and writing. Word awareness contributes significantly to vocabulary development, comprehension, and overall language proficiency.
Word awareness has three progressive stages.
Use manipulatives like blocks, counters, or small toys to help students visualise the separate words within sentences. Ensure students use only one manipulative to accurately represent each word in a sentence.
Start with short 3 and 4-word sentences with monosyllabic words. Then, introduce multisyllabic words and small function words (a, to, the) before increasing the difficulty to longer, more complex sentences.
Gradually increase sentence complexity and pace as students become more confident.
This structured approach, combined with practical examples and a clear progression from simple to more complex sentences, will help your young learners develop a solid understanding of word awareness.
The Gradual Release Model is an effective teaching strategy that moves from teacher-directed instruction to student independence. Here’s how it can be used to teach word awareness.
Progressive Difficulty: As students become more comfortable, introduce more complex sentences by gradually increasing the number of words or syllables.
Use clear, slow pronunciation, especially in the initial stages, to help students distinguish between the words.
Encourage students to start with the far left counter and move along the row from left to right. This reinforces reading direction.
As an experienced teacher, I have found that hands-on learning activities are the most effective way to teach word awareness to preschool and kindergarten students.
Here are some fun and engaging activities that I have tested and found to be successful in my classroom:
To develop word awareness in your students, start by developing their listening skills. Encourage them to listen to sentences and try to identify the separate words. This can be done through simple exercises like repeating sentences and clapping for each word.
To deepen the understanding of word awareness, say a sentence with a missing word and ask your students to fill in the blank. For example, A ___ is a pet. This encourages children to think about the structure and meaning of the sentence. An oral cloze activity is great for consolidating the concept of a word.
Another fun way to develop word awareness involves playing with the word order of a sentence. Say a simple 4 or 5-word sentence, jumbled up and see if your students can unjumble the sentence. For example, say, “Like, apples, I, red”. Ask them to rearrange the words to say a sentence that makes sense. This activity is great for developing the concept of a sentence and for word awareness.
Teach word awareness by naming objects around the classroom and playground. As you walk together through the school, pause to point out and name different things you see. For example, say, "This is the office. office is a word." Emotions and concepts can also be expressed through words. For example, say, "I feel happy. Happy is a word," or "We're learning maths next. Maths is a word." This simple activity develops vocabulary and helps students develop word awareness. I like it because it is quick and easy to implement.
Highlight words throughout the school day. Make it a point to emphasise individual words in sentences during everyday conversations. For example, when saying, "Please push your chair in." Put a finger up for each word as you say it. Then you can point out, "That was five words!"
If you have student name cards, days of the week cards, or labels on objects in the classroom, frequently refer to them as words. Label everything! Classroom objects, resources and learning tools. Discuss the idea that labels represent written words.
Have a word scavenger hunt where students search for labelled pictures hidden around the classroom. Want some labelled pictures perfect for this activity? You can download my comprehensive set of animal picture cards here.
