Phonemic awareness and phonics are often taught as two completely separate skills, but they don’t have to be, and honestly, they shouldn’t be. When taught together, phonemic awareness and phonics reinforce each other and help students move more smoothly from hearing sounds to reading and spelling words.
Phonemic awareness focuses on working with sounds in spoken words, while phonics connects those sounds to letters and print. The most effective instruction helps students bridge the gap between the two by starting with oral sound work and gradually connecting those sounds to letters in meaningful, hands-on ways. This approach makes learning more concrete, supports decoding and spelling, and helps students understand why phonics works.
When phonemic awareness and phonics are connected early and intentionally, students are better able to transfer their sound knowledge to real reading, rather than keeping those skills stuck in isolation.
Let’s talk about something that comes up in my inbox all the time. I regularly get emails or DMs that say something like, “This activity can’t be phonemic awareness because it uses letters.”
And I get where that belief comes from. We’ve all heard the phrase “phonemic awareness can be done in the dark.” And yes, it’s true. Phonemic awareness is an oral language skill. Students should be able to hear sounds, blend them, break them apart, and manipulate them without print at first.
But here’s the part that often gets misunderstood. Just because phonemic awareness can be done without letters doesn’t mean it must always be done without letters.
That phrase was meant to remind us that phonemic awareness is about sounds, not memorizing letters. It was never meant to create a hard rule that phonemic awareness and phonics need to live in completely separate lanes. Somewhere along the way, though, that reminder turned into a rule… and that rule started causing confusion in real classrooms.
What I often see happen is this: Teachers feel that phonemic awareness must remain 100% oral, and phonics must wait its turn. So phonemic awareness happens during one part of the day, phonics happens later, and the connection between the two is mostly implied. But students don’t automatically make that leap.
I’ve taught kindergarten long enough to see it play out over and over again. Kids who can blend sounds orally during a phonemic awareness warm-up sometimes freeze the moment letters appear. Not because they don’t know the sounds, but because no one explicitly showed them how those sounds connect to print. They’re doing the skill… just in two separate worlds.
This is the biggest myth I want to clear up. An activity does not stop being phonemic awareness, just because letters are involved. What matters is what students are being asked to think about.
If students are working with individual sounds, blending them, segmenting them, swapping them, then they are still practicing phonemic awareness. Letters don’t magically turn that into phonics. Letters simply give sounds something concrete to attach to.
Think about it this way. If a student is pushing counters into sound boxes to represent phonemes, we all agree that’s phonemic awareness. If you replace those counters with letter tiles and the student is still focusing on the sounds, the skill hasn’t changed. Only the tool has.
That’s not “doing phonics instead.” That’s bridging phonemic awareness to phonics.
The goal of phonemic awareness isn’t for students to be great at oral blending forever. The goal is reading.
At some point, students have to take what they know about sounds and use that knowledge to decode and spell words. When phonemic awareness stays disconnected from letters for too long, some students struggle to transfer those skills. They might be able to tell you the sounds in cat out loud, but feel lost when they see c-a-t on the page.
When we intentionally connect sounds to letters, we help students understand why phonics works. Sounds stop being abstract. Letters start to make sense. Reading feels more logical and less like guessing. That’s when confidence starts to build.
This doesn’t mean skipping oral phonemic awareness. Oral work is still essential, especially in the beginning. But instruction can evolve.
You might start with oral blending and segmenting. Then add pictures or sound boxes. Then, gradually replace those supports with letters. The task stays the same. Students are still working with sounds. The only thing that changes is how those sounds are represented.
Eventually, those same skills flow right into reading and spelling. Students aren’t learning a brand-new concept, they’re applying something they already understand. That’s the bridge.
Phonemic awareness and phonics aren’t competing ideas. They’re part of the same process.
Phonemic awareness helps students understand that words are made of sounds. Phonics shows them how those sounds are represented in print. When we teach them together, intentionally and thoughtfully, we give students a clearer path to decoding, spelling, and fluent reading.
So yes, phonemic awareness can be done in the dark. But if our goal is confident readers, we don’t want it to stay there.
Check out some simple ideas to make phonemic awareness and phonics more hands-on and engaging!
