Object sortĮxtend the object match game by collecting groups of items that begin with the same letter.

Think key, sock, potato, and olives over knife, shovel, phone, and orange. Prioritize clear examples of a letter’s most common sound, as described in the discussion of keywords above. Ask children to match objects to cards with their beginning letters. Gather up a collection of household items that begin with different letter sounds. You could use letters that spell a common word or the child’s name and make it a challenge to find them all. Have a child hunt for the letters, identifying each one as they discover it. Hide magnetic letters in a tray of wet sand, Kinetic Sand, Play-Doh, or other similar material. Scoop out a letter and say its name and/or sound. Give your child a big spoon and stir the metaphorical pot of alphabet soup. Put magnetic letters, letter puzzle pieces, or foam letters into a big bowl. Try both versions out loud you’ll see what we mean.) Alphabet soup It’s a lot easier to blend the short, enunciated sounds /h/ /u/ /m/ than the mouthful of “huh” “uhhhhh” “muh.” (Trust us. Learning letter sounds accurately gives kids a leg up when they start blending sounds together to read words. These are easily bungled, but kids need a solid grasp on them when they start trying to read words like mat, dip, and bug by saying each sound and blending them together. Pay special attention to the short vowel sounds of A, E, I, O, and U.

F is a quick /f/, not “fuh,” L has s a clipped /l/ sound, not a sing-song “laa,” and so on. ( This quick video by kid-favorite YouTube personality Jack Hartmann covers this nicely.) Notice how our buddy Jack does not add an extra schwa (“uh”) sound when enunciating the sound each letter makes. Take a few minutes to confirm that you know the correct sound for each letter. It might sound silly, but it’s helpful for adults to brush up on the basics to avoid giving kids misinformation before you start these activities. Luckily, we only need to learn to read and write once! Below are some fun and engaging activities to help your child learn letters! And below the activities there are answers to some common questions about how and why children should learn letters. Phonetics is the science or study of speech sounds and their production, transmission, and reception, and their analysis, classification, and transcription.ĭoes this feel overwhelming? Don’t worry. The very beginning of phonics instruction includes learning the sounds that the letters of the alphabet represent. Phonics is a method of teaching reading and spelling based upon the phonetic interpretation of ordinary spelling. As they do this, they also must develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle-that an alphabet is made up of written symbols that correspond to spoken sounds. Through both informal exposure and direct teaching, kids learn to recognize and write each letter symbol in the alphabet in both uppercase and lowercase. Sound and letter knowledge do eventually merge for kids. It’s only when we can hear individual sounds in words that we can write them or use them to read. While phonemic awareness refers to speech sounds, it is an essential building block for learning to read and write using an alphabet. The ability to hear and manipulate these sounds is known as phonemic awareness. Individual units of sound are called phonemes. Even toddlers can recognize that a request to find one’s socks isn’t the same as one to find rocks, though they likely can’t articulate how they know. Through hearing and producing speech sounds, children begin to intuit that words are made up of little units of sound, and these different sounds are what distinguish words. Young children also begin learning about sounds in language well before they know about letters. Many children begin learning their letters by singing the alphabet song-complete with that adorable “Elemeno P” for L, M, N, O, P-before they even know anything about what letters are. How kids first learn about letters and sounds Here’s the lowdown on the different aspects of learning about letters-and plenty of fun activities to help your children or students become alphabet experts. But, there’s much more to learning the alphabet than a cute rendition of the ABC song. Parents, caregivers, and educators celebrate children’s mastery of the ABCs as an important milestone on the road to reading and writing.

Spelling alphabet for kids