Developmental Stages in Phonemic Awareness

Auditory Discrimination-- children can differentiate between sounds of different animals

Visual Discrimination

Teaching Consonant Sounds

Initial consonants
Consonant digraphs (sh, wh, th, ch)
Consonant blends (br, cl, str, etc.)
Substituting initial consonant sounds
Sounding consonants at the end of words
Consonant digraphs (nk,ng, ck, qu>
Consonant irregularities
Silent consonants
Sight-word list--non-phonic spellings
Contractions

Teaching Vowel Sounds

Short vowel sounds
Long vowel sounds
Teaching long and short vowel sounds together
Exceptions to vowel rules taught
Diphthongs
Sounds of oo and oo

Syllabication

Rules
Prefixes and suffixes
Compound words
Doubling final consonants
Accent

By the end of Kindergarten children who are developing normally, should be able to say whether two single syllable words rhyme and should also be able to generate rhymes for a given word.

Children in the first semester of first grade might be able to blend the phonemes /a/ and /t/ together to form the word "at" their ability to blend increasingly longer strings of sound will improve as they practice the skill while reading.