phonological awareness Goals

List Of Sample IEP Goals For Phonological Awareness

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Last Updated on February 4, 2022 by Editorial Team

How can a language be mastered without learning to read? Despite efforts made by schools, the implemented pedagogies may not be adequate for all the students. For special needs pupils, specialized care needs to be taken to make them potent. This is what IEP (Individualized education plan) ensures. IEPs require special focus for every notion, whether fluency or phonological awareness. 

As elucidated in previous IEP posts, IEP goals must be simple, measurable, and time-bound, ensuring learning disabled learners meet academic thresholds. We have seen IEP goals for fluency and social skills development in this quest. Now it is time to have a look at the IEP goals for phonological awareness. 

Sample IEP goals- What should they encompass?

A goal can be purposeful presuming that it reports a behavior/skill that has a positive influence on the learners. Hence, they are written in such a way that they are developed with relevant intercession. Appropriately, an ideal Sample IEP goal should possess the following pivotal traits:

  • Comprehension: Before considering a sample IEP goal, the current physiological status of students is inspected. Thus, they are drafted to be comfortably inferred. 
  • Successional Approach: Since these  lesson plans are fabricated to preach special needs children, a sequential approach turns obligatory. Conferring them enough time to grasp and then educating further notions above it formulates lucid learning.
  • Individualizability: Specialized pedagogies, as we know, are designed for learning compromised students. While sample IEP goals can be designed for a group of pupils, these can be essentially personalized for a student by executing some minor changes. 
  • Retaining  Components: After designing a custom-tailored lesson plan, the instructor may need to prepare a set of IEP goals accordingly. They must ensure inevitable components like time frame, condition, behavior and criterion to ensure cogency.

Phonological awareness- All you need to know!

Reading and spelling success is the ultimate goal of every language learner, and the foundation of the same is Phonological awareness since it is the ability to retain and manipulate various spoken parts of words and sentences. Therefore, it is the global awareness of sounds and managing them. For the reason that Phonological awareness is crucial, these are preached to tender students from pre-school, kindergarten, and sometimes grade1 too. 

Intensive and enticing training of phonological awareness in the early years can mitigate reading issues in later stages, especially for those who feel it is taxing to decode and segment phonemes. By possessing Phonological awareness, a learner could not only know the letter sounds but also be able to blend them to speak out. To preach the same, schools focus on syllable, rhyme, alliteration awareness, and phonemic awareness, which are powerful predictors of early language success. 

Research by Louisa Moats1 discusses why phonics in early ages can be a critical component of reading and spelling, where complex challenges can be portrayed. It also illustrates that phonics is better characterized as that aspect of structural language teaching that requires explicit and systematic skill building within the capabilities of the learner and the instructors. 

All the above information shows that  Phonological awareness can help students in:

  • Addressing alien words and comparing them with known words
  • Repetition of words to ensure correct pronunciation 
  • Retaining and encoding terms precisely to retrieve in future. 
  •  Distinguishing similar sounding words on the basis of their meanings. 

Objectives of phonological awareness

As we comprehend now, Phonological Awareness is a combination of syllables, rhymes, and phonics. All these components are to be mastered one by one, possibly in a sequence to mark alphabets and sounds effortlessly. All of these notions can be learned effectively if one has the following objectives in mind:

  • Learn to identify Words within sentences
  • Learn to segment syllables within words
  • Grasp the first (Onset), and the last (rime) sounds in a word
  • Decoding all the sounds (phonics) in the word. 

To ensure all these objectives, with perfection, instructors may employ letter-sound relations, instructional sequences, and manipulatives to build activities. To preach what letter-sounds relations are, two words having the same letters but different sounds can be taken to illustrate. To give a multisensory touch, manipulatives like letter magnets can be used. The advantage of letter magnets is that students can add and substitute letters effortlessly to form new words. 

IEP goals for phonological awareness

While we recognize that phonological skills are pivotal for reading and spelling ability, interpretation of it must be warranted at the right tender age. Speech-language cognizance has five different domains to master, phonological awareness forms the inceptive skill among them. Every preschooler needs to grasp the following goals to master phonological awareness:

  • Rhyming: identification of a sequence of words where there is regular recurrence of similar words, mostly at the ends. These are formed by the arrangement of a  nucleus (vowel), and a coda (the final consonant). 
  • Syllable Awareness: Identifying and comprehending different syllables that make up words is crucial to establish a sound-print connection. Students need to grasp the ability to hear phonemes and traverse speech sounds as syllables. 
  • Phoneme Isolation: Distinguishing various phonemes in a word without showing it on a paper or  print. 
  • Sound Blending: The ability to construct words and thus sentences from various individual sounds in a particular sequence. 

IEP goals of phonological awareness- Samples outlined to attain

To write an IEP goal for Phonological awareness, you may need to mention three key components in every statement. These are — DO, CONDITION, and CRITERION.

DO depicts what the instructor/parent is going to do and that particular skill they will be looking towards. A great example would be Identifying rhyme in each word. CONDITION  is the setting that they work on the skill. For instance: Using manipulative activities. CRITERION  is the measure of the performance of the kid. Just like with 75% accuracy. Every IEP goal for Phonological awareness is illustrated with the formula: 

DO + CONDITION + CRITERION

For Example, Nori will identify rime in each word using manipulative activities with 75% accuracy.

One must jot down various facets of phonological awareness to make a flawless set of goals custom-tailored for their kids. While some need to focus on rhyming, others may need sound blending awareness, identifying these can lead to appropriate culmination. Now that you know how to write and comprehend IEP goals for Phonological Awareness, let’s contemplate  some sample goals that may work for your little learner.

STEP 1: Rhyming Awareness :

Rhyming is the inceptive level of phonological awareness which preaches how to identify two words with similar soundings. An instructor can weigh up the following sample goals:

  • Ask the students to recite various rhymes like Humpty-Dumpty to inoculate what rhyming words are. Recurrent practicing can ameliorate rhyming skills.
  • Once little ones learn to read, they are asked to identify rhyming words in their books.
  • Games may now let them master rhyming. For instance, they are asked “I say gate, you say rate. I say bread, you say _______.”
  • Noticing kids identifying rhyming words, instructors can now insist them to produce a few such words. 

STEP 2: Phoneme Isolation:

Since the learners need to identify and isolate different phonemes, the following goals may be considered:

  • Reading out words loud by differentiating their phonemes (into beginning, middle and ending),
  • Once they identify phonemes, teachers can provide them with assignments like matching the objects that have same phoneme at beginning or ending 
  • Later, pupils learn what letters together make a phenome and thus into words. For instance, CAT is made of /c/, /a/, and /t/.

STEP 3: Syllable Awareness:

Syllables are sounds or that part of the word which has a sound. These usually have a vowel in it which can be used to teach. Instructors can check out the following goal:

  • Preach them the 6 types of syllables
  • Given a word, the little one should first identify vowels, they may mark it.
  • Now, ask them to determine if there are consonants in between them.
  • Inferring the types of syllables, they need to observe these consonants to identify various syllables.
  • Ask them to cut off each syllable and write it in a different place and read them out loud.

STEP 4: Sound Blending:

  • Start with a small word like cat, hat or jam. Write the first two letters on paper and ask the toddler to spell it. For instance, HA is spelled /ha/.
  • Now write the third letter and ask them again to finish the spelling. Here, when adding T after HA, the toddler would have to identify /t/ to spell /haat/.

Crucial phonological awareness goals are illustrated in the samples above based on ideas from various legitimate sources. Pupils, once mastered these, can rise with the following outcomes: 

  • Identifying various syllables in a word.
  • Segmenting and blending syllables in words—Onset and Rimes
  • Identify Words that Rhyme
  • Segment a sentence into words
  • Deleting and manipulating Sounds in spoken words

Summing up

Since the central idea behind Phonological awareness is to comprehend various sounds, syllables, and words in a sentence, IEP goals for the same need to be designed to give a cumulative pedagogy. Evidently, these goals are written to ensure no load on the learner. To empower the same, regular assessment may be essential. While some prefer daily monitoring, some maintain tracking sheets. Grasping what your toddler precisely needs can make you prepare a set of custom-tailored IEP goals. 

References

[1] Phonics and Spelling: Learning the Structure of Language at the Word Level: Moats L. (2019, September 26)  

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