If you are teaching your child to read, consider this step one of your journey. In order to teach your child to read, you first need to teach letter sounds. Think of letter sounds as lego blocks; once your child knows letter sounds, they can put them together in many different ways to read, or write, lots of words.
On a side note, while this is the first step in your child’s reading journey, there is a pre-reading journey. If you are curious about your child’s pre-reading skills, take a look at this post.
When you are introducing a new letter sound to your child, it can be difficult to know where to start. Let me share with you how to teach letter sounds and you will be able to apply this to all of the sounds you teach your child.
Why Should I Teach Letter Sounds?
Why do we teach sounds instead of letter names first?
The answer to this very simply is: Knowing letter names won’t help a child to read, but knowing their sounds will.
Let’s look at the word ‘tap’. If a child knows their letter names, they might say ‘tee’, ‘ay’, ‘pee’, even if they try to roll/blend the sounds together, they won’t make it to ‘tap’. On the other hand, if they know their sounds, they would say ‘tuh’, ‘ah’, ‘puh’, they can then say these sounds in quick succession and blend to get ‘tap’.
I like to think of it like this sometimes too; if you teach your child the names of the letters of the alphabet, they will be able to read two words: ‘I’ and ‘a’. Teach them the letter sounds (and additional graphemes) and they’ll be able to work out the whole dictionary(ish!)!
Does my Child Need to Know Letter Names?
In a word, or two(!) – not really! Obviously it is useful to be able to name the letters for different purposes, calling out spellings, etc.
But when it comes to learning to read, especially starting out, stick to sounds only.
Teaching the letter sound and name too close together can cause some confusion for some children.
6 Steps to Teach Letter Sounds
So let’s break it down. 6 super simple steps to introducing a new sound to your child. These steps will work for every new sound that you want to teach your child.
Even if it seems boring and repetitive to you, it is consolidating and reinforcing for them.
To make this a little easier, I will use ‘s’ as my example the whole way through.
Step 1: Introduce the Sound only
Introduce the sound, not the letter name, or even the letter, just the sound.
My favourite way to do this is through a sound box or mystery sound bag. Gather a few items, that start with the new sound, from around the house and place them in a box or a bag, e.g. spoon, spiderman, saucer, scooter, etc.
Ask your child to take the items out of the box or bag and name them. Tell them your new sound is at the beginning of each of these words.
Ask them to guess what sound you are going to learn about today.
Step 2: Add a Story to go with the Sound
Children love stories, especially the random ones that we make up on the spot! It’s up to you if you want to plan a story of just ad lib!
Create a short story that features today’s sound a lot.
‘Stephen went for a stroll by the sea. His dog, Sammy, went too. Sammy started barking at something by the rocks. Stephen went to see what was wrong. He was startled when he saw a snake.’
We can fit the sound in plenty of times in a few short lines. This will help your child to hone in on the sounds and develop an ear for it.
I purposefully didn’t highlight the ‘s’ at the end of ‘was’ as it doesn’t make the exact sound we are teaching today. This is just a side note as obviously your child won’t be looking at the text!
Step 3: Attach an Action to the Sound
Add an action to your sound. If possible at all, use the action at some stage during your story from Step 2.
For ‘s’ we move weave our arms in an ‘s’ shape and say ‘ssssss’ like a snake. This ties in nicely to our story in Step 2.
If you’re wondering about actions for letters, you’ll find them in my workbooks. Or you can think up of your own set of actions. As long as they make sense to you and your child and are easy to remember, they are perfect!
Step 4: Introduce the Letter
The big reveal!!
Show your child the letter. Chances are your child is already quite familiar with this letter but it is important to build as much of the association with the sound and action as you can before jumping in with what the letter looks like.
Step 5: Add the Sound and Action to the Letter
With the letter in front of you and your child, tell them the story again.
Ask your child to join in with the action for the sound when it comes up in the story.
As a follow up activity, ask your child to keep an ear out for your new sound for the rest of the day. When they hear the sound, they can either do the action, repeat the sound or do both!
Step 6: Trace/Write the Letter
When we are teaching our children to read, it is also the best time to introduce them to writing.
Ideally, they will have done some pre-writing work. If they haven’t, now would be a good time to go back to that. Lots of colouring, cutting and gluing and tracing patterns.
Take this opportunity to teach your child how to form the letter correctly. Many children will just try to recreate the shape they see on the page instead of learning how to correctly form the letter.
Learning good letter formation now makes it much easier for them as they learn to write whole words and especially if you want them to write cursively in the future.
You’ll find some worksheets for tracing and writing letters as well as activities for sounds in my workbooks also. Get the first workbook here for free.
Conclusion
While this might seem like a long post for a relatively short process, I think it’s important for us to understand the steps. Maybe this is your first time teaching a child to read, or perhaps it’s just your first time using phonics to teach a child to read.
Either way, just like your child, take it slowly at first, get the foundation right and you will get faster as you go on.
Good luck as you embark on the journey to teach letter sounds and if you have any questions, pop them in the comments below!
If you are looking for a quick refresher of these steps, you’ll find a short video here on my TikTok!