Terms on the Phonological Awareness Continuum
In addition to the brief description below, I am including a link to a site that explains some of the information on the continuum, but moreover; it provides a chart showing the approximate age of phonological awareness skills acquistion for 80 to 90% of typical children.
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/development-phonological-skills
Listening - Children have to be able to listen to songs, poems, and books that have rhyming words and they have to be able to listen to sounds, words, conversations, etc.... Listening is important for children so they can fully understand sounds in words.
Rhyme - Rhyme refers to words that share the same final sound or sound sequence such as in hat, cat, mat, pat.
Alliteration - Alliteration refers to words that share the same initial sound in close succession: Example: (Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." or "Zany Zebras zigzagged through the zoo."
Sentence Segmenting - Hearing or counting words in a sentence (Mary had a little lamb. - five words in this sentence)
Syllable Blending/ Segmenting - Blending/Segmenting syllables is seperating words into syllables; putting words together to make a whole word (book bag = bookbag, dog house = doghouse, car pet = carpet).
Onset and Rime Blending/ Segmenting - The Onset is the initial consonant or consonant blend before the vowel. The Rime is the vowel and any consonants that follows it: Example: (in the word hog- "h" is the onset and "og" is the rime). (In the word shop- "sh" is the onset and "op" is the rime).
Phoneme Blending/Segmenting - Phoneme blending refers to the ability to identify a word after hearing the individual parts of the word (known as phonemes) in isolation and then blending them together. Example of Blending: (the phonemes are c-a-t = cat) (the phonemes are b-i-ke = bike). Phoneme segmenting refers to the ability to hear a word as a whole and then break it down into its phonemes. Example of Segmenting: (the word is cat = c-a-t) (the word is bike = b-i-ke)