What Is Phonological Awareness?

Phonological awareness is when you can hear and play with the sounds in words, like building blocks.

Imagine you have a toy box full of letter blocks, sound blocks instead of letters. When you say a word out loud, like "cat," it's like taking that toy box apart into smaller pieces: c, a, and t. That’s what phonological awareness is, being able to hear those little sound blocks inside words.

Sometimes you take just one sound out of a word. Like if you say "cat" and then remove the c sound, you're left with "at." It's like taking away a block from your tower, it still stands, but it’s shorter!

Other times, you put sounds together to make new words. If you add a b sound in front of "at," you get "bat", like adding a new block to your tower.

You don’t need letters to do this; you just use your ears. It’s like listening closely to music and hearing individual notes inside a song. You can hear the sound blocks even if you can't see them, just by paying attention when you speak or listen.