Teaching & Learning - Heggerty Phonological Awareness
Developed in 2003 by Dr Michael Heggerty, the Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is a systematic 35 week program of daily lesson plans that provide a high level of explicit modelling and student engagement.
This program focuses on the 8 phonemic aware skills, along with two additional skills of letter and sound recognition and language awareness:
- Rhyming
- Onset fluency
- Blending
- Isolating final and medial phonemes (sounds),
- Segmenting
- Adding phonemes
- Deleting phoneme and
- Substituting phoneme
Phonological awareness allows children to recognize and work with the sounds of language. Phonological awareness is the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. It refers to the bigger “chunks” or “parts” of language. When we ask students to rhyme, blend small words to make a compound word, break words apart into syllables or onset-rime, we are working at the phonological awareness level.
Phonological awareness is a strong predictor of reading success. It is especially important at the earliest stages of reading development and is a foundation for reading.
Phonemic awareness if the understanding that spoken words are made of individual sounds called phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of a sound we hear in a word. Phonemic awareness falls underneath the umbrella of phonological awareness. Rather than working with larger units of spoken language, we ask students to listen for the individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words.
All lessons are designed for a classroom setting, only take 10-12 minutes, and are very easy to implement. The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is also designed to work alongside existing structured synthetic phonics programs and is a great way to build up the phonological skills of our early readers.