What is the best strategy for a teacher to assess children’s phonemic awareness?

The most effective strategy for assessing children's phonemic awareness is through phoneme segmentation activities. This approach specifically targets the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds within words, which is fundamental to phonemic awareness. During these activities, children are asked to break down words into their constituent sounds, allowing the teacher to observe their understanding of how sounds work together to form words. Such direct assessment provides clear and relevant insights into each child's phonemic skills.

While group reading sessions and standardized testing may provide some information about overall literacy skills, they do not focus exclusively on phonemic awareness, which is a critical area for early literacy development. Observation during interactive play can be valuable for gathering information on social skills and general language use but is less targeted for phonemic awareness assessment compared to structured phoneme segmentation activities.