Success with Letter Sounds

Sep 10

Automaticity of letter names and sounds is important because letter-sound correspondences are the foundation to phonics and decoding. So the quicker they are, the faster they can decode. When we help students connect the letters and sounds and help them both master and be automatic, we’re giving them a strong reading foundation.

Here’s your quick guide on how to move students from mastery to automaticity in letter sounds, but first, an inspirational quote from Neuhaus

“The importance of automatic letter recognition cannot be overstated. Fast and accurate letter reading is not the end goal. However, rather, it’s a stepping off point to automatic word reading that frees up cognitive attention to focus on higher level skills like fluency and reading comprehension.”

What Are Letter-Sound Correspondence?

Letter-sound correspondence involves knowledge of the sounds represented by the letters of the alphabet and the letters used to represent those sounds.
This knowledge is so important because our students need to be sure that the letters they see are connected to a sound. This skill is essential for reading and writing.

How Do We Teach Letter-Sound Correspondence?

Phonemic Awareness Warm-Up with blending and segmenting

Explicit Teaching:

Letter Name

Letter Identification
Letter Sound
Letter Articulation
Connecting Sound to Symbol
Letter Formation

Review

1. Phonemic Awareness Warm-Up

Begin by simple blending and segmenting of words. All of this should be done orally.

Teacher: (blending) “Class, today we’re going to work on our sounds. Can you listen carefully and tell me what word I’m saying? B-u-g. What’s my word?”

Students: “Bug!”

Teacher: (segmenting) “My word is bug. Can you take apart the sounds in bug and tap them out as you say them?”

Students: “/b/ /u/ /g/.”

2. Explicit Teaching of Letter Sounds

Letter Name

Begin with just the image of the letter.

Teacher: “Today, I’m going to introduce the letter S. Here is what an uppercase letter S looks like, and here’s what a lowercase s looks like.”

Letter Identification

Show the letter S amongst a group of other letters.

Teacher: “Can you find the letter S in this cluster?”

Letter Sound

Connect the letter to a picture representation of an image that begins with that sound.

Teacher: “This is the letter S. It sounds like /s/ as in s-s-sandwich, s-s-sun, and s-s-sandbox,” pointing to each picture.

Letter Articulation

Showing our students how to articulate the sound and what’s happening in their mouth when they say it is supremely helpful to students.
We must show them the differences between stop sounds (sounds that pop) and slow sounds (sounds that continue on). These pocket mirrors on Amazon are perfect for students to see what their mouths do while making this sound. Using visual cue cards that show pictures of mouths making these sounds is also helpful.

Teacher: “This is the letter B. It says /b/. Do you see how I stop after I say the sound? This is a stop sound - it pops and stops! Hold up your mirrors and say the sound.”

Connecting Sound to Symbol

Give students time to practice that sound using the letter through picture representation.
This is where we connect the sound they hear with the letter they see. They will make the sound, ensure that the articulation is correct, and have them connect to a picture representation.

Teacher: “We just learned about the letter S. This is what S looks like and sounds like. Let’s look at pictures that represent that sound at the beginning. I have a picture of a s-s-sun. Do you hear the /s/ sound at the beginning? Yes!“

Letter Formation

Students need to be able to form the letter correctly in print.
This matters because it helps with mastery and automaticity with letter sounds and automaticity in writing.
I have some letter-sound chants that you can use in your own classroom so you can show your students how to write each letter!

3. Review

After all this explicit teaching, THEN we can begin the review process. This is actually where we move the needle from mastery to automaticity.
Once students have practiced all of those letter skills, we move the letter into our warm-up section of our lesson. If you’ve explicitly taught the letter S, move it into the warm-up deck and bring it out each time to review it before you explicitly teach a new letter.

Bringing It All Together

Eventually, students will take these sounds and phoneme segmentation knowledge and blending they’ve been working on orally and begin to put the two together.
Once students know 10-12 letter sounds, we can begin blending. We don't need to wait until they know all 26 letters!
When they do this, they have knowledge of the alphabetic principle: they understand letters are represented by sounds on the page and can begin decoding and writing. And that, my friends, is READING!