Basic to phonics is PHONEMIC AWARENESS.  Phonemic awareness involves the knowledge that spoken words are made up of discrete sounds. It also involves the ability to manipulate these sounds in different ways. 

Phonological Awareness and Phonemic Awareness are not the same. 

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS is a general term that refers to all sound features in spoken language. It involves the awareness of sound elements in spoken words. Phonological awareness involves knowing that boat rhymes with coat. It involves knowing that the name Jonathan has three syllables,

PHONEMIC AWARENESS –which is part of phonological awareness—deals only with phonemes, the smallest units of sounds in words.  It involves the ability to recognize and manipulate these basic sounds.  Phonemic awareness involves knowing that Mommy and Michael begin with the same /m/ sound. It involves knowing that changing the /a/ phoneme in bad to /u/ changes the word bad to bud. It involves knowing that dropping the /s/ in slap makes the word lap.

Phonemic Awareness is not the same as Phonics.

Phonemic awareness deals with sound only. Phonics involves sounds and the symbols that represent these sounds. (However, phonemic awareness can be helped when children manipulate letters while engaging in phonemic awareness activities.)

In an instructional setting, phonological/phonemic awareness includes:

rhyming, recognizing and producing rhyming words
segmentation, breaking words into component parts
isolation, identifying individual sounds in words
deletion, taking out phonemes from spoken words
substitution, switching one sound for another in words
blending, putting sounds together to form words

RHYMING involves the ability to recognize words that rhyme:

bark, dark, mark, park, shark, etc.

It also involves being able to say a word that rhymes with another:

“a word that rhymes with king is…”  (sing or ring)

EXAMPLE: Which two words rhyme in the following line? 

Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails?  (snails and tails)

SEGMENTATION is the ability to break words into their component phonological parts.  It includes separating the independent elements in compound words:

cook-book       air-port            base-ball

It includes the ability to segment syllables in multisyllable words:

            ta-ble               po-ta-to           in-for-ma-tion

It includes the ability to segment individual phonemes in spoken words:

/b/-/a/-/t/          /m/-/u/-/sh/       /b/-/e/-/n/-/t/

EXAMPLE:  Listen to the word I say: lamp. How many sounds are in the word?
What are they?  (4; /l/ /a/ /m/ /p/)

ISOLATION involves the ability to identify where phonemes occur in words—at the beginning, middle, or ending. 

Children isolate and identify the /s/ phoneme at the beginning of words like

soup, salad, soda, sun, sit, sad

Children isolate and identify /b/ at the end of words like

cab, rob, club, grab, mob, rib.

Children isolate and recognize medial vowel sounds in words like

make, face, same, cane, wave, late.

EXAMPLE: Which of these four words does not begin with the same sound—  fish, phone, light, finish?  (light)

DELETION involves mentally removing part of a word to make another word.

When /d/ is deleted from dear, it makes ear.
When /b/ is deleted from band, it makes and.
When /k/ is deleted from cart, it makes art.

            EXAMPLE: If I take away the first sound /j/ from John’s name, what word would I make?  (on)

SUBSTITUTION involves changing words by replacing one sound with another.

Substituting /b/ for /r/ changes bat to rat.
Substituting /t/ for /p/ changes cup to cut.
Substituting /a/ for /e/ changes met to mat.

            EXAMPLE: If I take away the first sound /j/ from John’s name and add the sound /r/, whose name would I say? (Ron)

BLENDING is combining individual phonemes to make spoken words:

blending the four phonemes /m/ /i/ /l/ and /k/ to make milk,
blending the five phonemes /d/ /r/ /i/ /n/ and /k/ to make drink.

Blending also involves putting onsets and rimes together in words:

/f/-/un/  fun       /h/ - /ot/  hot     /f/- /ind/ find

            EXAMPLE: These are the three sounds that make a word that names something that I love to eat: /k/  /ay/  /k/.  Can you tell me what the word is? (cake)

Phonemic awareness is an essential prerequisite to phonics and is highly related to success in beginning reading.