Do YOU Know Your Letter Sounds?

 

Letter sounds are one of the bedrock pieces of early literacy.  But you might be surprised to find that you may not actually know the correct letter sounds yourself.  (I know I was!)

Recently, I was working with a small group of kindergarten students on letter sounds and I noticed an interesting trend.

Many of the students were adding an “uh”  to the ends of their consonant letter sounds.  So when we worked with the letter “B”, I was hearing “buh”, “buh”, “buh”.  For “M” I got “muh”, “muh”, “muh”.  And so on.

That may get a passing grade on a phonics test, but will hamstring struggling readers down the road, and here’s why.

Before reading, children learn to hear and manipulate the sounds in words.  This “playing with sounds” falls under phonemic and phonological awareness and is highly predictive of reading success later on.  (Read more about that here.)  This skill is independent of the written word — it’s simply hearing the sounds in words.  This allows kids to hear that the word “play” (though it has four letters) has three sounds :

p-l-ay

This is segmenting phonemes, breaking apart the sounds in a word.  Similarly, children develop the skill of blending phonemes, hearing that those “stretched out sounds” can come back together to form a word.

(Read more about stretching words here.)

Eventually, as children learn the letters associated with those sounds these same skills help them to decode as they read (blend) and encode as they spell (segment).

It’s all connected in this grand process of literacy.

So, back to my kindergarten friends.  

When children learn that the B sound is “buh”, it gets them started in the right direction, but sends them on an unfortunate detour.  Because as you segment the word “bat” you don’t hear “buh”, “a”, “tuh”.

Try blending those sounds together.  You end up with the three-syllable word, “buhatuh”.

Those extra sounds are very confusing for a child learning to blend and segment!

This extra “uh” sound is called a “schwa”.  It feels natural to put this schwa on the end of the letter sound because many of those consonants are usually followed by a vowel sound.  Rather than leaving them hanging, we tack on this “uh” (schwa) to make ourselves feel better.  It’s like a wild card for vowels.

But when children learn letter sounds as though that wild card is a part of the letter sound then critical skills like blending, segmenting, and later, decoding and encoding become extremely difficult.

In my effort to help my kindergarten friends, I found this post from Jessica Boschen of What I Have Learned, which further explains this sticky schwa problem.

She points out that consonants are generally either “stop sounds” (a short, staccato sound) or “continuous sounds” (one sound prolonged).  That means letter M’s sound is a continuous “Mmmmmm” not the schwa-infested “muh”.

Because we use something called a “mmmm-ap” not a “muh-ap”.

And the letter P has a short, breathy “p” sound, rather than a “puh” because your friend’s name is “P-am” not “Puh-am”.  (Unless, of course, her name really is Puh-am, then by all means…. ;0)

There are also a few tricky letters, which is why I finally learned, at the age of 39, the correct sound for the letter Y.  (It sounds strange at first, but it makes complete sense when you consider how the sound is actually blended into words — which is the whole point.)

Jessica explains each correct sound in a quick, 10-minute video in her post here or on her facebook page here.

Whether we’re teachers in the classroom or parents playing with letter sounds at home, it’s important that we make sure that WE know the correct letter sounds first!

 

Once you have your own sounds down, try these great letter sound activities!

13 Fun Ways to Learn Letter Sounds {No Time for Flash Cards}

Teach Letter Sounds Using 26 Kid-Centered Photos {Teach Mama}

Alphabet Fun {Growing Kinders}

Humpty Dumpty Letter Crack {PreK Pages}

 

More Literacy Resources:

Does Your Alphabet Chart Need to Be Recalled?  {NJC}

Stretching Out Words: Playful Ways to Practice Phonemic Awareness {NJC}

Why Don’t You Teach Reading: A Look at Emergent Literacy (Series) {NJC}