What do you know about Phonemic Awareness?

Phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, and phonics all sound very similar, but they all have different meanings. 
     Phonemic awareness is very important to your child because it is a strong predictor of early reading success. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds. Yopp, H. K. (1992).  It is important because a child must have an understanding that letters represent sounds or phonemes.  A child that lacks phonemic awareness has a great deal of trouble making sense of phonics.

     So...you may be wondering - What is the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness???
     Remember - that phonological awareness is the broad term that includes rhymes, words, syllables, phonemes, and onsets & rimes. Phonemic awareness is a "subset" of phonological awareness because phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes.  As a reminder a phoneme is defined as the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes meaning~or the individual sound of a letter. Meaningful groups of phonemes are strung together like (/d/+/o/+/g/) and eventually the reader moves from phonemes to words to phrases and to sentences.