Phonemic Awareness is one of the main skills that you will teach as a Kindergarten teacher. But, how do you know if your students are really “getting it”? It's important to complete phonemic awareness assessments in Kindergarten to help guide and differentiate your instruction and assist those who need additional help.
There are two ways that I would assess my students phonemic awareness skills. They both are simple to do and take little to no additional time outside of your regular school day to complete.
Informal Assessment
One way to assess is with a simple checklist form. Print out a checklist (I use this one here) with all your students names and attach it to a clipboard. At the top, write down a specific phonemic awareness skill you want to assess. During your phonemic awareness warm-ups, (maybe once a week) assess students on a particular skill. Maybe you've been practicing oral blending and want to see where your students are at. Have each of your students blend a word orally, and if they can do it with no help, make a check next to their name. If not, mark an X. Now you have a list of who can and cannot do that particular skill.
You can also do this throughout the week during your normal phonemic awareness warm-up time. For example, maybe “Counting Syllables” was one of your skills this quarter that you had practiced for a few weeks now. Instead of doing the warm-up whole group, just explain to your students that everyone will get a turn to count syllables by themselves. On Monday, have 6-8 students get a turn counting syllables and check it off if they did it or not. The next day, have another 6-8 students do it.
Formal Assessment
Another way to assess is a more formal one-on-one assessment. Maybe you need to have a phonemic awareness grade on the report card each quarter. Or you like to have that data to show parents during parent-teacher conferences.
At the end of the quarter, I designate a week to do all my assessments during center time. I call students one at a time to do their one on one ELA assessments (which includes phonemic awareness skills). The rest of my students work on centers during both center time and whole group time (instead of 4 centers for an hour- we did 4 centers for one hour, break, then 4 more centers for another hour for about a week or until assessments were done). Each student took about 5-10 minutes to complete assessments, but then I am done within a week! It's a lot to squeeze in, but it has always worked well for me.
What skills do I assess?
I did like to assess phonemic awareness quarterly by focusing on 2-4 skills per quarter. It may look different for you, but here is what I typically did:
- Quarter 1: Isolate beginning and ending sound, counting syllables, rhyming, oral CVC blending
- Quarter 2: Isolating middle sound, matching beginning sounds, blending onset and rime, produce a rhyming word
- Quarter 3: Isolating digraphs and blends, matching rhyming words, segmenting CVC words, substituting beginning sounds
- Quarter 4: Short or long vowel, substituting middle sounds, oral blending (with long vowels), phoneme deletion and addition
I only did about 2-4 questions per skill. Usually my students were super quick with their phonemic awareness skills because we had been practicing these skills all quarter.
Want an easy way to assess phonemic awareness with your students? You can grab the Phonemic Awareness Assessments for Kindergarten to get editable checklists for informal assessments, and quarterly assessments based off of the Kindergarten Daily Phonemic Awareness Warm-Ups. If you already own the Phonemic Awareness Daily Warm-Ups, I have included these in the resource! Just re-download for the latest version.
Do you teach First Grade? You can find your assessments included in the Phonemic Awareness Daily Warm-Ups for First Grade and also as a separate resource here: First Grade Phonemic Awareness Assessments!