Tell Me about Fred's Fat Foot Again: Four Tips for Successful PA Lessons

This teaching tip applies research on phoneme awareness (PA) to propose an instructional model for teaching PA. Research suggests children need to learn the identifying features of phonemes to recognize them in spoken words. In the model, teachers focus on one phoneme at a time; make it memorable to children through sound analogies supported by illustrations, hand gestures, and graphemes; provide engaging practice detecting the phoneme in "tongue ticklers" and in spoken words; and lead children to transfer their knowledge of phonemes to the task of learning to read words. (Contains 3 figures.)