Teaching Alphabet Sounds to Young Children

Avoiding the Biggest Mistakes Parents Make Helps Kids Learn to Read

Jun 19, 2009

Knowing letter sounds is an essential pre-reading skill, but many parents teach them wrong! Avoiding this and other errors helps kids read as early and well as possible.

Teaching a preschooler to read is one of the most difficult undertakings for a parent. Reading is second nature to most adults and it's been decades since they've given any thought to how they actually do it.

Teach the Letters of the Alphabet and Their Sounds

Kids as young as two years old can begin learning to recognize the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make. This is an important pre-reading skill, and the sooner a child has it down pat the sooner he or she can start reading. Many parents teach the alphabet through games and activities, and some do it with a letter of the day.

Depending on the age of the child, the process of learning the letters well could take up to a year. But it's very important not to rush children into reading before they are familiar with all the letters. They should know each letter sound like the backs of their hands before they start reading.

Most Parents Teach Letter Sounds Wrong

However, parents often teach letter sounds incorrectly, which impedes their children's progress toward reading. Kids should first be taught the most common pronunciation of each vowel (otherwise known as the short sound), even though there are many exceptions. Learning that U says "uh" is easy to grasp for a preschooler; trying to understand and remember that U can say "uh," "oo," or "uah like in push" is confusing.

Parents also make a major mistake by adding vowel sounds to the consonants. If a child learns that M says "muh" instead of "mmm" and N says "nuh" instead of "nnn," then a word like "man" will be very difficult for them to read farther down the road. Sounding out "muh-aaa-nuh" hardly resembles the word "man." But when taught correctly, children should easily be able to sound out "mmm aaa nnn" and figure out what they're saying.

Correct Pronunciation for Each Letter

So what is the right sound for each letter of the alphabet? LeapFrog's Letter Factory [2003] is an excellent DVD that teaches kids to recognize and learn every letters' sound correctly. Here is a rundown of the right way to teach letter noises:

Children should be encouraged to draw out vowel sounds to make them nice and long. When they get to three-letter words, this will help them tie together the consonants at the beginning and the end.

Consonant sounds should be short, staccato sounds with no vowel sound at the end. A few reminders about the trickiest consonants:

Start by Sounding Out Words With Two Letters, Not Three

Another common mistake is to jump right into three-letter words, some of which are especially hard for preschoolers to put together. When reading books, pause to ask the child to sound out common two-letter words like "in," "on," "at," and "up." (Just make sure to avoid words like "of" and "as," which don't make the sounds exactly as children were taught. These are sight words that kids will just have to memorize later on.)

Sadly, there is a fairly limited selection of "real" two-letter words for kids to read. So parents should make up their own! One method is writing all the letters on separate index cards, placing the vowels in one pile and the consonants in another, and randomly drawing one of each to assemble funny new words to sound out. This will give children a proper foundation for being able to read three-letter words and beyond.

Correctly being able to identify and sound out each letter of the alphabet is the most important pre-reading skill there is for toddlers and preschoolers. Parents and teachers who avoid common mistakes like pronouncing letter sounds wrong or skipping two-letter words in favor of three-letter ones will find that their children learn to read much more quickly.

The copyright of the article Teaching Alphabet Sounds to Young Children in School Readiness is owned by Jenny Evans. Permission to republish Teaching Alphabet Sounds to Young Children in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Sep 21, 2009 1:50 PM

Guest :

Please explain this to me, as I cannot see how mmm-aaa-nnn sounds closer to man than muh-a-nuh. The second choice here clearly sounds man. The first doesn't.
I would love an answer. I agree that for pure phonemes, mmm may be more correct, but surely not more helpful in learning to blend sounds/ read words.

Oct 9, 2009 11:24 AM

Guest :

To Guest who commented on sounds of the word man, saying the sounds correctly, mmm aaa nnnn is the better way to learn becaus eit helps them blend when they are using phonics to sound words out. I am a parent who taught her daughter all the sounds of the alphabet before she started preschool at 2. I just wanted to leave a comment in reagrds to the article where it says "Kids as young as two years old can begin learning to recognize the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make." Truthfully, kids can already know their sounds by two, start when they are babies. Just because they can't talk doesn't mean they aren't learning. They are designed to learn and develop from birth. One day it will all start flowing out like a waterfall.