What is the primary focus of phonemic awareness with respect to sounds?

Phonemic awareness is fundamentally about the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. The primary focus lies in the skills of blending and segmenting these sounds. Blending involves combining individual sounds to form words, while segmenting refers to breaking words down into their constituent sounds. This skill is crucial for early literacy as it lays the foundation for reading and spelling.

Emphasizing blending and segmenting helps children develop a strong understanding of how sounds correspond to letters and words, which is essential for decoding and encoding when they start reading and writing. Recognizing grammar rules, improving handwriting, and understanding sentence structure, while important components of literacy, do not directly relate to the fundamental capabilities developed through phonemic awareness.