A kindergarten teacher could assess a student's phonemic awareness by asking them to?

Assessing phonemic awareness involves evaluating a child's ability to recognize and manipulate the specific sounds within words. By asking a student to identify the sound at different positions in a word, the teacher can directly measure how well the student understands how sounds function in language. This could involve tasks such as determining the first, middle, or last sound in a word, which are crucial components of phonemic awareness.

In contrast, writing a short story focuses more on the child's ability to express ideas and use language creatively, rather than their understanding of sounds. Reading a passage aloud assesses fluency and comprehension but does not directly target phonemic awareness. Counting the number of letters in a word is related to phonics and spelling rather than phonemic awareness itself, which is specifically about the sounds that make up words. Thus, identifying sounds in different positions is a more targeted and effective way to assess a student's phonemic awareness.