Online Courses for Teachers

Developing Phonemic Awareness in Emergent Readers

(Grades PreK-2) / Flex Course

PDI Course Number: 76T02 / UCSD Course Number: EDUC41478

Course Description

Are you struggling to find effective research-based teaching practices to teach the essential foundational skills of reading? This online course for teachers is designed to help PreK-2 educators as they explore a variety of ways to develop their students’ phonemic awareness skills so that these emergent readers can become more successful, both in school and at home. The course begins by delving into the research behind phonemic awareness. Teachers will learn how to assess their emergent readers’ phonemic awareness skills. Teachers will take a deep dive into a variety of research-based best practices as their young students learn to auditorily and visually discriminate the various sounds and letters as they transition from emergent to early readers. Teachers will be introduced to the alphabetic principle, and they will learn how phoneme knowledge can be used to blend sounds into words. Several instructional strategies for helping students increase their phonemic awareness include such things as blending, rhyming, onset and rime, syllable segmentation, and more. As students learn about print concepts, teachers will learn how to use the language experience approach to reinforce basic phonemic skills and concepts so that student comprehension increases. Other essential foundational skills which are addressed throughout the course include the cloze procedure, maze technique, retelling procedure, high frequency and sight words, and read-alouds. Teachers will understand how to build essential home-school connections so that the basic reading skills learned in the classroom can be practiced and reinforced at home. Finally, teachers will be introduced to the connection between phonemic awareness and writing. By the end of this continuing education course, teachers will feel more confident in their ability to incorporate a variety of best practices into their own teaching habits so that PreK-2 students have a solid foundation in phonemic awareness. This online professional development course is worth 3 ⅓ semester units/5 quarter units (50 hours of training) from University of California San Diego (UCSD) Division of Extended Studies. For detailed information on receiving university credit for your PDI professional development course, visit our credit page.

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"I have taken several online courses and the PDI course content and resources were excellent. I was able to transfer course content to my classroom directly. I am very pleased that I took this course." - Christian Barnes