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Phonemic and phonological awareness are critical components of early reading skills, particularly in understanding how spoken language works and how it relates to written language.

Phonological awareness is a broad skill that includes the ability to recognize and manipulate larger units of spoken language, such as words, syllables, onsets, and rimes. It encompasses various levels of sound structure within spoken language and involves the following abilities:

1. Word Awareness:   Recognizing that sentences are made up of words.

2. Syllable Awareness:  Identifying and counting the number of syllables in a word.

3.  Onset and Rime Awareness:  Recognizing the initial sound (onset) and the rest of the word (rime).

4. Rhyming:  Identifying and generating words that rhyme.

5.  Alliteration:  Recognizing and producing words with the same initial sound.

Phonemic awareness is a subcategory of phonological awareness, and refers specifically to the ability to focus on and manipulate individual phonemes, the smallest units of sound in spoken language. It involves more refined and detailed skills than phonological awareness and includes:

1.  Phoneme Isolation: Identifying individual sounds in words (e.g., identifying the first sound in "dog" is /d/).

2.  Phoneme Identity:  Recognizing the common sound in different words (e.g., /b/ is the common sound in "bat," "ball," and "boy").

3.  Phoneme Categorization:  Identifying the odd sound in a sequence of words (e.g., finding the word that doesn't start with /s/ in "sun," "sock," and "cat").

4.  Phoneme Blending:  Combining individual phonemes to form a word (e.g., blending /c/, /a/, and /t/ to form "cat").

5.  Phoneme Segmentation:  Breaking a word into its individual phonemes (e.g., segmenting "dog" into /d/, /o/, and /g/).

6.  Phoneme Deletion:   Recognizing what word remains when a phoneme is removed (e.g., removing /s/ from "star" leaves "tar").

With its comprehensive, spiraled scope and sequence, Guided Phonics + Beyond facilitates an effective, research‑based approach to phonics instruction.  The units include the gradual release model, repeated routines, orthographic word mapping, decodable high‑frequency words, irregular words, dictation, word chaining, phonemic awareness integration, and decodable texts. Creator Tara West has been involved in education for over 15 years, serving as an early childhood educator, a curriculum writer, and a professional development speaker. Tara believes in the importance of creating instructional materials and resources that are fun and engaging to students and supporting the teachers who use her materials.

The focus of this model is to support the development of foundational reading skills of children in kindergarten, first, and second grade.  The program follows a scope and sequence of the skills and concepts that children need to acquire to become competent, confident readers. The scope and sequence begins with the introduction of sounds and letters and the correspondences between them. Students apply this knowledge as they learn to read and spell increasingly complex words and text.