Now that we have learned all of the letters and their corresponding sounds we are spending lots of time using this knowledge to practice phonemic awareness.  Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, which are the smallest units of sound in a word.  We have worked on these skills in a variety of ways including segmenting words and sorting them by their beginning, middle, and final sounds, and blending phonemes into words using magnetic letter tiles or writing on white boards.  A favorite way to practice this is by building words in teams.  Each child is given one letter card.  I call up one sound at a time and we slowly tap each sound as I touch each child's head, blending the sounds into the corresponding word.  We have mostly focused on simple three letter words, but children are eager to be challenged with longer words or words with more complex patterns such as /sh/ or /ch/.  Phonemic awareness is a critical component of reading acquisition and we will continue to build these skills in a variety of ways throughout the year.