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Teaching letters and sounds to preschoolers is not just teaching the alphabet song

I have been a speech and language pathologist for 25 years. When I am doing speech therapy with children as young as three to correct the wrong sounds in their speech, I am well aware that since they are not yet readers, they do not have the same understanding of sounds and letters as older children. they already have. . Some preschoolers know the letters and may know the alphabet song. However, the connection between a letter and a sound is usually not something that children learn until they attend pre-kindergarten or kindergarten. This is much later than the connection should be established. Letters and sounds are different concepts and it is just as important to teach the connection between the two as it is to teach the letters themselves. I teach the name of the letter paired with the written letter and then I teach the sound the letter makes. All of these are taught at the same time to give children a complete understanding of the connections and give them a good basic knowledge to help them learn reading skills more easily.

Parents will generally teach their children the classic alphabet song that is sung to the Twinkle tune, Twinkle Little Star. A song is a great way for people of any age to memorize information. It is also important to match what the children sing with a picture of the letters as they sing them. If no concrete connection is made between the lyrics that are sung and heard and the lyrics that are written and seen, then children are just learning a song at random. Learning the label of a picture or an object is the way these preschoolers have already learned the vocabulary they know. Parents have put labels on things in the child’s environment. All children should have an alphabet poster or graphic of some kind that should be taken out when the ABC song is sung. They should be taught to play each letter as they sing it. This will avoid that single “LMNOP” group that you clearly think is a letter.

The next step for children to learn is that each letter makes a sound. This sentence will help them learn that there is a difference between a letter and the sound it makes. The same table can be used when teaching children that each letter makes a sound. I like to use a song that I heard in a pre-K classroom with all of my children in speech therapy. I take the sound they point to and put it in the song. The song has the melody of “hot cross buns” and it would go like this: “D says duh, D says duh, each letter makes a sound and D says duh”. This can be used with all sounds. I use short vowel sounds when singing vowels. When the vowels are long, they say the name of their own letter. Children will learn the rules for when a vowel says its own name when they learn the rules for reading in school. Short vowels are found more frequently, so I think it makes sense to expose children to this. When singing vowels, short sounds “a” (as), “e” (bed), “i” (in), “o” (lit), “u” (up) are used. These tend to be more difficult for children to learn to read and write, and any prompting is helpful. The pre-k classroom chooses a letter each week to write down and then carries out activities throughout the week with that sound. Artistic activities, searching for things that start with that sound, etc. I suggest that parents do the same. As the weeks go by, increase the length of the sonic song and mix the lyrics so they aren’t just learned in order. This job of matching sounds and letters will give your child a big leap in early reading skills. We tend to forget that just because a child can sing the alphabet song does not mean they know its letters. You just know a song if the written lyrics and the sound of the lyrics are not taught at the same time.

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