The research is not definitive about this. In practice, younger children and children with less experience playing with and thinking about language will, at first, have a hard time with phoneme-level tasks, like separating onset from rime. Syllable-level tasks can pave the way for phoneme-level activities ...

Learning syllable awareness tasks — such as blending, segmenting, deleting, and adding — at the phonological level builds a foundation that is helpful to have when students are ready to learn more complex phonics and language skills. Children in kindergarten ...