sound-letter links

Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness, Phonics.

Jj is for Jottings 94.  Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness and Phonics.

Picture of the book "Aa is for Alpacas" on a pot-bellied stove, with the caption: Learning phonics with this book helps with phonemic awareness and phonological awareness skills, too.

Learning phonics with this book helps with phonemic awareness and phonological awareness skills, too.

You may have heard the terms “phonological awareness”, “phonemic awareness” and “phonics” and wondered what they mean and whether they are different terms for the same thing.  Let’s sort this out right now.

PHONICS.

This is sound-letter links – i.e. learning which sound is made by each letter of the alphabet, and other sounds which are made by combining 2 or more letters.  Children develop the concept that there are consistent relationships between letter symbols and sounds.  This book is a great way to learn sound-letter links.  But you need to make sure you are saying sounds rather than letter names.  You can find this on the video. Continue reading →

Vowel Discrimination Activities.

Jj is for Jottings 84.  Vowel Discrimination Activities.

Vowel Discrimination Activity 3. Identifying /i/ and /e/, plus a picture of the Ii is for Itchy page of "Aa is for Alpacas".

Vowel Discrimination Activity 3. Identifying /i/ and /e/.

 

As promised in the previous article, here are some vowel discrimination activities to help your child to hear the difference between vowel sounds, in particular the tricky pairs of a/u and i/e.  At the same time these activities reinforce the sound-letter links for the vowels.  After all, it’s not much use for reading and spelling if you can hear the difference between them but don’t know which letter belongs to the sound. Continue reading →

Analysing Sounds.

Jj is for Jottings 81.  Analysing Sounds.

Photo of a child analysing sounds in the alphabet book "Aa is for Alpacas" with his grandmother.

Henry is learning sounds the fun way with “Aa is for Alpacas” and the help of his grandmother, Ann.

 

Analysing sounds in reading is really the opposite of blending sounds (see here and  here for discussion and exercises in sound blending.)  Analysing sounds is simply breaking words into their component sounds (whereas blending sounds is joining the sounds up to make words).  The progression is: listening for and isolating sounds at the beginning of a word, then at the end, and finally the vowel in the middle (assuming it is a consonant-vowel-consonant [CVC] word).  It is even better to begin with 2-sound CV words, to make it as easy as possible in the early stages.

The Usual Problem Rears Its Ugly Head – Using Letter Names Instead of Sounds.

If I had a dollar for every time I have said: “What sound can you hear at the start/end of – ?” and the child says the letter name, then I’d be really quite wealthy.  What you need to do then is to use the letter name instead of the sound in the given word to prove that it doesn’t work.  Eg. When a child says that the first sound in “dog” is dee, the response should be along the lines of, “That would be “deeog”.  You said the name of the letter, not the sound that you can hear.  /d-o-g/ makes ‘dog’”.   You also need to encourage them to feel the sound in their mouth.

Children Really Need to Know Letter Names and Sounds When Analysing Sounds.

Of course, if children know the name and sound of each letter of the alphabet, they are far more likely to correctly give you the sound rather than the letter name when analysing or blending words.  This is where  Aa is for Alpacas comes in as the means of teaching this with least effort.  The final goal is to have the alphabet clearly written/printed out in front of the child: Point randomly to letters and say “name” or “sound” and, when the child responds correctly 100% of the time, they really know their sounds and letter names.

Tune in next time for activities to assist children to analyse sounds in words.

Check out the Facebook page: Aa is for Alpacas

 

 

Blending Sounds: A Simple Game For Everyday Life.

Jj is for Jottings 77.  Blending Sounds: A Simple Game For Everyday Life.

What is Blending?

Blending is “pushing” individual sounds or syllables together to make a word.  In early stages of reading the child will be blending sounds, but as they progress and begin to recognise chunks of words, they will also be blending syllables. Continue reading →

Understanding Unclear Speech.

Jj is for Jottings 74.  Understanding Unclear Speech.

When a child’s speech is unclear, it could range from a single sound substitution such as a lisp (which is, in effect, saying /th/ instead of /s/ and which, although not perfectly clear, is perfectly intelligible) right through the continuum to multiple substitutions, omission of sounds and syllables, addition of sounds, and distortion of sounds – the result of which is likely to be largely or completely unintelligible. Continue reading →

What is Synthetic Phonics?

Jj is for Jottings 65.  What Is Synthetic Phonics?

We’re just taking a break from the series on How to Raise a Reader – we’ll finish it next time.

Synthetic phonics means “building words from individual sounds”.  For example, even if you had never seen it before, you could spell the word “step” 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/

 

 

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.