The three most important elements of reading are
1. Phonological awareness
2. Phoneme awareness
3. Phonics
Phonological awareness is the first approach to reading. It makes children get familiar with sound used in our spoken language. The idea here is to let the children know that the words are made up of sound. Rhyming is mostly used to teach phonological awareness.
Phoneme awareness just like phonological awareness, makes children get used to sound of English.
It involve activities like identifying sound in spoken words and blending of sound to form words orally.
Phonics teaches sounds and their letter representation called 'Phoneme' and also alternative representation of the sound called 'Grapheme' . E.g /ee/ can be represented as 'ee' , 'ea' ,'e'. It also teaches how to blend the sound to form words and how to pronounce unknown words.
