After a student has developed phonemic awareness, what is the next effective lesson?

The focus on sounding out and blending the letters in words represents a critical next step in the progression of literacy development after a student has acquired phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness involves the ability to recognize and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words, which is foundational to learning to read.

Once students have this awareness, they can move into decoding, which involves taking their understanding of sounds and applying it to the written form through letters and combinations that correspond to those sounds. By practicing with simple words like "mat" and "sat," students begin to connect the phonemic sounds they can hear to the letters they see, facilitating their ability to read. This process is essential for building their reading skills, as it enables them to accurately and efficiently read new words independently.

Other options, while also important components of early literacy, do not directly proceed from phonemic awareness in the same way. Identifying words in sentences primarily focuses on the concept of word boundaries rather than the phonetic decoding that follows phonemic awareness. Reading simple books independently assumes the skills of phonetic decoding are already in place. Writing stories using proper grammar incorporates more advanced language skills and conventions, which typically come later in the literacy learning process. Therefore, concentrating on blending sounds