Originally Posted by
niccig
This is probably due to her decreased attention. Phonemic awareness is your ability to be aware of all the speech sounds (phonemes) in a word. So, cat is /k/ + /a/ + /t/, it's 3 sounds. Phonemic awareness is a needed skill to then learn phonics - ability to match speech sound to the written letter (grapheme). If you're not aware of the speech sounds in English, you can't match a grapheme to the sound, and this affects your reading. I have one student who has severe working memory deficits and he struggles with phonemic awareness as he can't retain the earlier sounds that were spoken, so there's several things that can affect phonemic awareness. DS was struggling with reading and he had very poor phonemic awareness, so I had him tested and therapy concentrated on improving phonemic awareness skills - rhyming, breaking a word up into syllables, then breaking up into sounds, then changing the sounds e.g. /k/ + /a/ + /t/ now change the /k/ to /m/ and what word do you have e.g. mat - Note, you're not saying the name of the letter, you're saying the speech sound. Once phonemic awareness skills have been strengthened, you may need to reteach phonics as previous lessons probably weren't understood by her.
Use whatever works with your DD. If it's Hamiliton songs, go for it. I used to have DS practice in the car. I'd have him break words into sounds and use street signs and things that we saw. E.g. "stop" sign, how many sounds in "stop", sound out /s/, /t/, /o/, /p/. Ok, now do "tree", "park", "house" etc. Not for the entire car ride, but 5 or 6 words. Initially, I had to do it with him together to model it, and have him count on his fingers as we said each sound, then he could do it on his own.
In my opinion, phonemic awareness isn't taught enough or correctly in preschool, pre-K, K. I actually incorporate some practice with many students I see for speech therapy as a warm=up activity.