letters

Digraphs vs. Diphthongs.

Jj is for Jottings 114.  Digraphs vs. Diphthongs.

Digraphs vs. diphthongs – what exactly are they and how do they differ?  They both begin with the same two letters, but then they diverge (get the pun?)

THE ROOTS OF DIGRAPHS AND DIPHTHONGS.

It is always helpful to understand the roots of words, because then we are able to transfer that learning to other situations.  It’s like teaching a man to fish rather than just giving him a fish.  (“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”  Maimonides.)  For a discussion of root words which underlie one of my pet peeves, see here. Continue reading →

Reading Difficult Words.

Jj is for Jottings 98.  Reading Difficult Words.

Picture of a man reading "Aa is for Alpacas", with the caption: Reading difficult words is not an issue with this book!

Reading difficult words is not an issue with this book!

When your child starts to read aloud to you, they will often have problems with reading difficult words.  These words may be just long, or tricky in other ways, such as having several consonants together.  (See consonant clusters).  Or they could have vowel patterns which are unfamiliar, the rules for which they don’t yet know.  It is important to give children time to try to work out the word for themselves.  This helps develop reading skills.  However, when they get really stuck you will need to help them out. Continue reading →

Short and Long Vowels – What Are They?

Jj is for Jottings 85.  Short and Long Vowels.

Since we were on the subject of vowels (see Auditory Discrimination of Vowel Sounds and Vowel Discrimination Activities), it occurred to me that you may have heard of short and long vowels and not know what they are.  You would think that a long vowel is a longer version of a short vowel, but they are completely different sounds.  Quite simply, short vowels are the sounds made by /a,e,i,o,u/, and long vowels are the names of those five letters.

Picture of a lilac Burmese cat stretched out asleep with the caption: Short and long vowels? Who cares? I'd rather have a zzzzz.

Short and long vowels? Who cares? I’d rather have a zzzzz.

 

WHAT DO SHORT AND LONG VOWELS LOOK LIKE?

Short Vowels.

The easiest short vowel words are 3-letter CVC words eg. bag, beg, big, bog, bug.  In each case we pronounce the vowel as its basic sound.  When syllables end in a vowel and then a consonant (as in the examples above), the vowel is usually short. If there is more than one consonant, the vowel is almost always short, eg. “back, stopped”.

Long Vowels.         

There are several ways of making long vowels.

  1. Putting two vowels next to each other. As a result, the word usually makes the sound of the first vowel’s name (“When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”).  Examples are “bead”, “mail”, “boat”.
  2. Another way of creating a long vowel sound is by putting an ‘e’ on the end of the word. This is often referred to as the “bossy ‘e’” or the “magic ‘e’”.  (“The ‘e’ on the end makes the vowel say its name.  The ‘e’ is silent.”) Examples are “bake”, “seed”, “hike”, “poke”, “mute”.  See how you can use a bossy ‘e’ to change a short vowel to a long vowel with these minimal pairs: can/cane; bet/beet; rid/ride; hop/hope; cut/cute.  If you say each of these aloud, it is very clear that the first half of the pair uses the sound made by the vowel, and the second half uses the vowel’s name.
  3. A vowel at the end of a syllable is almost always long.  Some examples of this are “I, we, he, she, go, try, potato and tomato”.
  4. -Igh and -ight are usually long I (and silent GH), so we have “bright, fight, high, light, might, night, right, sigh, sight, tight”.

Remember that this is English, and there are almost invariably exceptions.

VOWELS OTHER THAN SHORT AND LONG VOWELS.

Short and long vowels aren’t the only vowel sounds, and the other vowels will be discussed next time.

 

Check out the Facebook page: Aa is for Alpacas.

 

Communication Milestones.

Jj is for Jottings 68. Communication Milestones.

Here is a chart put together by a group from Queensland and the National Office of Speech Pathology Australia which you may find useful.

Here is the link if you want to print copies.
www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/milestones

Raising a Reader Part 2. Toddlers.

Jj is for Jottings 62.  Raising a Reader Part 2.  Toddlers.

Continuing from the previous article (here), you cannot overestimate the importance of reading with a child at the toddler stage – for intellectual, social and emotional development.  They take in everything: vocabulary and language structure, numbers and math concepts, colours, shapes, opposites and many other language concepts, animals, manners and all kinds of useful information about how the world works. What’s more, when you read out loud, Continue reading →

More Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless

Jj is for Jottings 59.  More Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.

 

I was reminded a couple of days ago that there is more to say on the subject of minimal pairs ( see Jj is for Jottings 47.  Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.  You may wish to read/re-read this before continuing), when an intelligent, well-educated adult fell into a common trap – thinking that the letter s (frequently a plural at the end of a word, but sometimes in the middle) is always pronounced as /s/, whereas in fact it is often pronounced as /z/.  Continue reading →

One Letter Doesn’t Always Equal One Sound.

Jj is for Jottings 48.  One Letter Doesn’t Always Equal One Sound.

 

If you have read “Aa is for Alpacas” you will already know this, but just in case you haven’t… the letter x is actually two sounds /ks/.  (Remember that the slashes mean the sound rather than the letter name/s.)  The other thing you will know Continue reading →

Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.

Jj is for Jottings 47.  Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.

 

You may not have noticed this before, but many of our consonant sounds in English come in pairs.  The sounds are the same except for the fact that one uses the voice and the other does not.  You’ll see what I mean when I tell you what the pairs are (with the first of each pair being the voiceless one): /p,b/; /t,d/; /k,g/; /f,v/; /s,z/; /ch,j/; /sh and the sound in the middle of “measure”, which does not have a letter to represent it/; and /th/ – voiceless, as in “thumb” and voiced, as in “the, mother”.  A minimal pair is a pair of sounds or words that differ by only one feature, in this case voicing.  Other minimal pairs may differ by a whole sound eg. beg/big; bat/bag.

Before we go any further, I should explain that the slashes (/ /) mark the fact that we are talking about a sound as opposed to a letter name.  This is explained in more detail in the introduction to Aa is for Alpacas. 

When teaching the sounds made by letters, many adults (including teachers) fall into the trap of adding the schwa vowel to voiceless consonants, with the result that /p/, for example, ends up as /pə/ i.e. a voiceless consonant, /p/, with a voiced consonant , /ə/, added to the end.  It should be just /p/ followed by breath.  Voicing voiceless consonants to children confuses them in the following ways:

  • They find it more difficult to discriminate between sounds (because /pə/ sounds much more like /b/ than a proper voiceless /p/).
  • It leads to some children having difficulty in identifying where one sound ends and the next begins.
  • It makes blending sounds into a word difficult because the unnecessary voicing adds more sounds to the word. An example: You are trying to sound out the word.   The two consonants /h/ and /p/ are voiceless, and of course all vowels are voiced.  Therefore the only part of the word which you should voice is the /o/.   /h/, /o/, /p/ = hop.  If you voice the voiceless consonants, however, you get /hə/, /o/, pə/ – five sounds, three of which are vowels.  It will be much more difficult to perceive the word hop now.

Some children have difficulties with the voiced/voiceless phenomenon in their speech.  It’s usually confined to voicing /p,t,k/ or maybe even just one of those, but it is remarkable just how difficult it makes them to understand when they voice all three of them.  And it is quite difficult to remediate, too.

Please be aware of the voiceless sounds and given them a fair go – your child’s literacy will be much the better for it.

 

See also: https://educatingalpacas.com/more-minimal-pairs-voiced-vs-voiceless/

 

 

Schwa – The Undercover Vowel.

6 days after we said goodbye to April, Shikha had to have surgery on his paw to remove a foreign body (which didn’t turn out to be there after all!) He kept walking around shaking his leg, trying to get rid of the yellow bandage with smiley faces on it. It lasted all of 24 hours. He said It Didn’t Make Him Feel Like Smiling and he Wasn’t Putting Up With It Any Longer.

Jj is for Jottings 46.  Schwa – the Undercover Vowel.

There’s a sneaky little vowel which we say many times every day and are probably quite unaware of it.  Its name is “schwa”, its phonetic symbol is /ə/, and it sounds like a little grunt.  It’s the undercover vowel because Continue reading →

Sticky Post

Welcome.

educatingalpacas.com supports the book “Aa is for Alpacas”.  See Why This Book?

Welcome to my blog – Educating Alpacas.  Does this mean that we are educating the alpacas – teaching them to count and so on – or are the alpacas helping to educate people?  Although we do a little bit of educating the alpacas (see blog post “Halter-Training April), it is mainly that the alpacas are involved in helping to educate both adults and children. The starting point for this blog is my book “Aa is for Alpacas”, written out of desperation at being unable to find an accurate alphabet book which measured up to my standards and which I could recommend to parents to help teach sound-letter links i.e. the sound made by each letter of the alphabet.  You cannot rely on this happening at school and, even if it does, children need to practise at home.

It is not only the lack of knowledge of sound-letter links which is tripping up children in the early stages of learning to read, but there are many other issues which I have observed during more than 35 years of working as a speech pathologist in education – issues which have arisen during this time and which are contributing to a decline in literacy in Australian children.  These concerns are shared by experienced teachers.  Via the medium of the blog and its accompanying Facebook page I set out to bring up issues which are affecting children’s learning, many of which may not have occurred to parents; some strategies for parents to implement with their children at home; pictures and anecdotes about the alpacas and their animal friends and neighbours; and any other vaguely-related issues which I feel moved to bring to people’s attention.

Since “Aa is for Alpacas” was the starting point for the blog, there are references made to both the animals in the book and to the information presented in the User Guide.  This is the only alphabet book that I am aware of which has a comprehensive guide for adults reading with the children, and it also has a book-reading (click on the Video button at the top of this page) so that adults can check whether they are saying sounds correctly and not confusing the children with letter names.  The book is aimed at 3-7 year olds, but can easily be used as a remedial tool for older children.

The Book Launch. This was in an educational supplies shop, Chalk and Chat, in Albury (New South Wales). Our shearer and his wife very kindly brought along two young, very well-behaved, alpacas for the children to meet.