Each of the above components work together to prepare a student to become a successful reader. Students need to be able to hear individual phonemes(sounds), distinguish between them, manipulate them, and hold them in their working memory in order to eventually find success decoding words.
Don't confuse PA with phonics. Someone once told me that PA practice can be done in the dark. You see the focus of PA is the sound system, not the alphabetic principle or how phonemes(sounds) are recorded by corresponding graphemes (letters). Instead, PA is truly about playing with sounds through rhyme, segmentation, blending and manipulation. Thus, it encompasses far more than just counting the syllables or phonemes in a word. The next post will take a more specific look at rhyme within the continuum.
