Phonological awareness is a broad skill that includes identifying and manipulating units of oral language – parts such as words, syllables, and onsets and rhyme. Reduced phonological awareness is a risk factor for literacy problems later on. Children who have difficulty hearing and processing different sounds in words will have difficulty putting these sounds back together when spelling and decoding.
Phonological awareness groups will work through the hierarchy of skills to support developing this area. The skills are rhyming, sentence segmenting, syllable segmenting, identifying onset ant rime (c +at, m +at), phoneme blending and phoneme manipulation.
Prior to starting a group, the Speech and Language Therapist will assess the child to determine whether individual therapy or joining a peer group would be the most beneficial. In each group every child has individualised goals that are targeted through-out group intervention.
