Introducing Letters and Sounds

At the start of this Emily inconsistently recognized a few letters and knew a few sounds. She had a reasonable pencil grip (I think it's so important to establish this early to avoid bad habits that can be so hard to break) and had some pen control.

I decided to start by teaching a letter each day. Our first letter was i, chosen due to the ease of writing this letter. I wanted to avoid any early frustration and it was important to me to introduce writing simultaneously with reading.

When I introduce a new letter I only focus on lower case and predominantly use the sound that the letter makes. Why? In reading and writing, we use lowercase letters more often, uppercase can be learned later and separately when there is more understanding of sentences and proper nouns. I use the phoneme (sound) as that is much more significant to become automatic in the child's memory. I want Emily to see the grapheme (letter or letters) and instantly know the phoneme it makes, this will be so valuable as she begins to blend sounds to read words and sound out words for spelling.

Writing Guidelines

Day 1 - To begin I introduced the Fundations guidelines for writing and drew them on our dry erase board. Showed her the Fundations picture card for the letter i (you can use any flashcard but having a keyword that begins with the target sound is key). We practiced saying i - /itch/ - /i/. I showed Emily how to write the letter using the guide lines and we practiced skywriting it a few times saying i - itch - /i/ after each. Then Emily wrote the letter on the board as I said the story (pen on the plane line, down to the grass line, pick up your pen, move above the line and dot). We then wrote the letter on sticky notes to post around the house and show people. Finally, we picked out a book and hunted for the letter i as we read it.

Fundations Picture Cards

Day 2 - Today's letter was t because it's so easy to write when adding onto i, plus there are so many words that start with t, and we were able to build our first word 'it'. We reviewed /i/ first then learned the letter-keyword-sound for /t/. Again I taught Emily the correct way to write the letter by starting at the sky line. We practiced with skywriting, writing on the dry erase board, then making the letters out of clay to trace with our fingers. Emily wrote the letter on sticky notes and we found objects around the house that began with /t/ to label. Finally, we build the word 'it' and I taught Emily to put her finger below each letter as she said the sound then blend them together to read the word.

Teaching Sequence

Originally I thought I would continue with letters that started at the plane line or sky line and go straight down. However, after teaching l and r I realized Emily was getting confused between the letters as they all look too similar so I changed tack and continued by introducing common letters that were still fairly easy to write but that looked very different to those already covered. This was the prefect adjustment and Emily quickly picked up p and o, the next two letters in my sequence.

There are many different sequences that you can use to teach the individual letters and related sounds. It is important to pay attention to your child and don't be afraid to change the sequence to suit their needs and strengths.

A couple of tips though:

• Teach letters that look very similar apart with others taught in between (I learned from my mistake on this one!)

• Keep short i and short e separate. I advise teaching short i first and only introducing short e once your child is very solid with /i/

• Teaching more frequently used letters such as t, s, r, p, allows you to introduce building simple words sooner

• Hard sounds are easier to learn for littles (b, p, t, k, g, j)

• Be cautious with r when you begin to build words make sure it is always before the vowel for now due to the r-controlled sounds that are taught later

As I introduce new letters we will continuously practice previously learned ones, start to blend the letters together to read and spell words, play games with the letters, and go back to revisit any tricky sounds or letters. Once Emily has a good grasp of the common letters and can blend cvc words accurately. I will introduce the idea of sight words, syllables, closed syllables, and sentences.