Book excerpt: Phonemic awareness--the understanding that words are made up of sounds--is essential to a child's early reading success. With this book, children gain this awareness through activities that are easy to teach and engaging. Children play with sounds through songs, rhymes, poetry, picture games, and other exercises. The activities cover the five basic levels of phonemic awareness: * the ability to hear rhymes and alliteration; * to do oddity tasks; * to orally blend word and split syllables; * to orally segment words; * to do phonemic manipulation tasks. Blends critical reading skills with joyful word play. For use with Grades K-2.