Identify some effective strategies for teaching phonemic awareness.

The correct choice highlights the importance of engaging students in interactive and playful activities that promote phonemic awareness. Rhyming activities and sound manipulation games are particularly effective because they help learners to discern, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. These activities foster auditory discrimination and help students recognize the relationships between sounds and letters, which are foundational skills for reading development.

Engaging in rhyming activities allows students to hear and explore sound patterns, while sound manipulation games, such as phoneme segmentation and blending exercises, encourage children to play with sounds in a hands-on manner. This type of active engagement is crucial for young readers as it lays the groundwork for later reading and spelling skills.

The other strategies mentioned do not directly support the development of phonemic awareness. For instance, reading texts silently does not involve the auditory practice necessary to develop an understanding of sound structures. Rote memorization of vocabulary focuses on memorizing word meanings and spellings without emphasizing the sounds that comprise those words. Lastly, while writing exercises are important for literacy, focusing exclusively on them neglects the critical auditory experiences needed to develop phonemic awareness.