7 Phonological and Phonemic Awareness Books to Help You Plan Your Lessons

If you’ve read this post about the differences between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, hopefully, you understand the definitions. If you’re still confused or new to this site, check out the post. If you’re ready, let’s dive into a few resources that will help you add activities to your lessons. Here are seven phonological and phonemic awareness books to help you plan for your students. Just a disclaimer though: this article contains some affiliate links. If you buy through my links, I may make a small commission, but you will not pay a penny more.

Equipped for Reading Success

This book by Dr. David A. Kilpatrick has just about everything you need to create a strong intervention program for phonemic awareness. Kilpatrick includes four forms of his Phonological Awareness Screening Test (PAST), explicit directions for administering the screener, then activities for each level on the test. You simply match each of your students’ results to the corresponding set of oral activities and plan instruction accordingly. These activities take about one minute to complete in each intervention session. I use this in my groups and love it. This book is my go-to. 

Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum

This multi-sensory curriculum serves students in early PK-2, plus there is a curriculum for older students in intervention. Teachers deliver a whole group lesson to kids complete with hand motions to help with connecting words and sounds. Students seem to enjoy it! These books aren’t cheap, though, and range in price from $49-$89. I believe they are worth it, though.

 The kindergarten book has 35 weeks of daily 10-12 minute lessons. Each day, students work on rhyme; initial, final, and medial phoneme isolation; blending and segmenting words, syllables, onset/rime, and phonemes; adding, deleting, and substituting syllables and phonemes.

The primary book serves students in grades 1-2 works similarly to the Kindergarten volume. Students get daily lessons mapped out for teachers to easily follow. The instructional plan includes rhyme; phoneme isolation; blending and segmenting syllables and phonemes; and adding, substituting, and deleting syllables and phonemes.

I personally have used these lessons, and to say that they are complete is an understatement. I have used both of these books, and I do love them. I find that they take more like 15 minutes to complete, but it took me a longer time to figure out the hand motions that go with each lesson. I’ve also used their intervention book for older students and found it to be really helpful for my striving readers.

Another Intervention program Heggerty includes for second grade and up is its Bridge the Gap book. This has the lessons planned out for teachers as well. This is another excellent resource, and I found it to be very helpful when I tried it out.

Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum

Marilyn Jager Adams, Barbara R. Foorman, Ingvar Lundberg, and Terri Beeler put together this series of activities to be done in the Kindergarten classroom. The book begins with listening activities, moves to rhyming, words and sentences, then progresses to phonemes and orthographic mapping. The activities are fun and engaging. These lessons allow children to play with language in the way we would hope they would in the years before they come to school. These activities are a fun addition to a phonological awareness curriculum.

In closing, these are all great resources for your students to help them develop phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. Hopefully one or more will be useful to you and your students!