Clapping out syllables in words helps children break down words into their component sounds, which is a key skill in phonological awareness
Phonological awareness is the awareness of and ability to work with sounds in spoken language, including recognizing and manipulating syllables, onsets, rimes, and phonemes.
Phonemic awareness involves recognizing and manipulating individual phonemes in words. Identifying the first sound in a word is a phonemic awareness task.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. For example, changing the /d/ sound in "dog" to /l/ changes the word to "log."
Identifying letter names and sounds is part of phonics, which involves the relationship between sounds and their written symbols. Phonological awareness involves skills related to sounds without reference to letters.