How to recognise when children need extra support to develop phonological awareness, and the best ways to help. By Penny Tassoni and Anne-Marie Tassoni

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QUESTION...

I work with a group of four-year-olds. We have been working on their listening and speech sounds and I have noticed that one of the girls really struggles. She is not able to tell if words rhyme or hear the difference between sounds. Should I investigate this further?

The skill of being able to hear sounds in words, including rhymes, is known as phonological awareness. It is the skill that allows us to know that ‘cat’ has one syllable, is made up of the sounds ‘c-a-t’, rhymes with ‘bat’, and if ‘c’ is swapped for ‘h’ the word changes to ‘hat’.

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