What strategy can a teaching assistant use to promote literacy skills?

Phonemic awareness activities are a highly effective strategy for promoting literacy skills among students. Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. By engaging students in activities that focus on these auditory skills, teaching assistants can help them develop the foundational skills necessary for reading and writing.

Activities that emphasize phonemic awareness might include exercises such as rhyming, segmenting sounds, blending sounds, and identifying sounds in words. These activities encourage students to listen closely and understand the structure of language, which is crucial for decoding words when they begin to read. This foundational literacy skill directly supports the development of more complex reading abilities, making it a vital component of effective literacy instruction.

In contrast, options like standardized testing may assess literacy skills but do not actively promote them. Group projects without reading do not support the development of literacy since they do not involve text engagement. Listening to music during lessons can be enjoyable and provide some context for language, but it does not directly focus on enhancing literacy skills in the same manner that phonemic awareness activities do.