You may have heard of "phonics" before, but do you know what "phonemic awareness" means and how important it is to reading development? Children's House families had the opportunity to learn all about it this week from our three reading specialist interns from the Harvard Graduate School of Education! Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken language. For example - say the word "bat". Now say the word "bat" without saying /b/. Can you do it? Did you say "at"? If you did, you were using your phonemic awareness skills to identify, separate and manipulate the sounds in the word. These abilities are a very important foundation to reading and writing. After learning about what phonemic awareness is, and why it is important, families explored stations where they discovered many fun activities to play with individual sounds, syllables, and rhyming words. Having fun with sounds and language can help prepare your child for a lifetime of joyful experiences with reading and writing!