Phonemic awareness is a fundamental skill for reading and spelling. Broadly speaking, phonemic awareness is the ability to segment, blend and manipulate phonemes. For example, splitting the word bug into its three phonemes b-u-g requires phonemic awareness.
As fluent readers, we tend to overlook how we’ve learned to segment sounds for spelling and blend them for reading because we’ve been doing these activities for so long they’ve become second nature. Largely, we do not remember how we ever came to learn how to read or spell.
As readers of an alphabetic language, our brains have been trained to complete segmentation and blending activities from an early age (ideally). In contrast, readers of a pictographic/ideographic writing system do not depend on phonemic awareness to read. Therefore, pictographic/ideographic readers never develop the same degree of phonemic awareness as readers of an alphabetic language. They develop other language skills unique to pictographic/ideographic deciphering, but phonemic awareness is not a fundamental skill in their tool bag for reading.
Whereas pictographic/ideographic readers decode using a one-to-one correspondence between each symbol and word, readers of an alphabetic language decode multiple phonemes and must blend them to create a word. Each phoneme must be isolated for spelling and blended together to decipher meaning for reading. These are not skills humans learn automatically. They must be practiced and mastered through phonemic awareness activities.
Brick Books are designed to gradually build a student's phonemic awareness. Phonemes are introduced slowly and practiced extensively. In this way, beginning readers can successfully read a whole book! Brick Books Letter Sounds A is currently available on the Kindle. The edition will be updated soon to include pictures.
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