Consonant examples for kids

Beginning Consonant Sounds in English - Learning Consonants

ABCmouse’s interactive reading games can help kids practice all the phonics fundamentals that build the foundation for successful and confident readers, including types of consonant sounds, short vowel sounds, and long vowel sounds.

Best of all, our fun reading games span the entire range of early reading. From the beginning of preschool through the end of second grade, you can rely on ABCmouse to help your child practice the fundamentals of beginning consonant sounds.

Our reading games are available on Mac, PC, Android, iOS, and Amazon-powered devices so that your child can access ABCmouse, whatever the time or wherever the place.

ABCmouse.com has also won several important awards, including: • Parents’ Choice Gold Award • Mom’s Choice Awards Gold • Teachers’ Choice Award

And while awards are nice, the true measure of success is how many children using ABCmouse are learning and growing, so we asked the people who know best: their parents.

In a study surveying more than 5,000 parents who use ABCmouse with their children, 85% of those parents reported a significant positive impact on their child’s learning.

The letters of the alphabet represent sounds that make up words. In order to read, your child needs to be able to identify these sounds.

Emerging readers practice recognizing beginning consonant sounds by listening to and then reading words and stories that have beginning consonants. For many children, practicing the ability to recognize sounds in words can make a big difference in how fast they learn to read.

Designed to help your child learn consonant sounds, ABCmouse provides many fun and interactive activities to develop their literacy skills, including the following: • Cutout Puzzles • Read-Aloud Books • Consonant Sound Games • Word-Building Activities • Alphabet Sound Books

Why Choose ABCmouse?

Created by expert teachers with decades of experience in early literacy instruction, ABCmouse is not only research based and proven to be effective—it also gets children excited about learning!

ABCmouse helps your child learn consonant sounds through original songs, puzzles, art activities, and printables. ABCmouse can help to build a strong foundation toward literacy that will continue to grow with your child as he or she progresses through ABCmouse activities.

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Consonants vs. Vowels

The alphabet is made up of 26 letters: 5 vowels and 21 consonants.

In English, vowels are the letters a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. Consonants are all the other letters in the alphabet that are not vowels, such as b, d, g, n, r, s, and t.

Consonant sounds are made by blocking air using your teeth, tongue, or lips. For example, say the beginning consonant sound in the word pad—“puh.” Your lips come together to block air to make the sound.

ABCmouse’s early childhood and elementary curriculum contains many activities and games designed to help your child practice consonant sounds.

Activities and songs on ABCmouse, such as “The Letter B Song,” help your child learn the difference between vowel sounds and consonant sounds, which is a key skill for beginning readers.

List of Consonants and Their Sounds

Placeholder paragraph Learning consonant sounds is important to sounding out and decoding words. Once your child knows these sounds, he or she can read and decode words, starting with beginning consonant sounds.

Fourteen consonants have only one sound: B, F, H, J, K, L M, N, P, R, T, V, W, and Z.

However, seven consonants can have more than one sound: C, G, D, S, Y, and X. The letter C, for example, can sound like an S (cell) or a K (cat). The letter G can make the sounds as in goat and gel.

It’s important for beginning readers to understand that some consonants make more than one sound. ABCmouse games and videos model these sounds accurately so that your child can start to learn, read, and spell sounds. Reading aloud with ABCmouse’s books will also help your child practice all types of consonant sounds.

Types of Consonant Sounds

Say the sound for the letter P, “puh.” Your lips comes together to block air to make the sound. Consonants are classified according to how they are produced—the type of consonant sound depends on how you use your mouth, teeth, and lips and how you move air when you make the sound.

ABCmouse’s early childhood and elementary curriculum contains many activities and games designed to help your child practice proper mouth and tongue formation when sounding out beginning consonant sounds.

Activities on ABCmouse, such as “First Letter in Line,” help your child listen for and use beginning consonant sounds. The sounds are isolated and then blended to show how letters work to build sounds and words.

Places of Articulation

Articulation is the act of making clear and distinct sounds. You make the sound of the letters P, B, and N by bringing your lips together. Your lips are one place of articulation. Some other places are

• your lower lip and your upper teeth: F and V.

• the tip of your tongue on your teeth: T, D, N, S, Z, and L.

• in the back of the mouth at the palate: K and G (when G makes the sound as in go).

• in the throat: H.

ABCmouse has many activities and books that will help your child hear different beginning consonant sounds, such as “Alphabet Sounds at the Zoo.”

Manner of Articulation

Consonant sounds have different manners, or ways, of articulation. When you make the sound of the letter S, for example, you put your tongue toward your teeth. Then, you push air through the opening to make the sound.

ABCmouse provides entertaining interactions for your child to hear articulation of types of consonant sounds, such as the book series Alphabet Sounds on the Farm.

Voiced vs. Unvoiced

When speaking, you use your vocal cords to make a voiced consonant sound. An unvoiced consonant sound doesn’t need your vocal cords.

Lightly place a finger on your throat when you make a consonant sound. If you feel vibrations, the consonant is a voiced sound. Dog, go, and man start with voiced consonant sounds.

Unvoiced consonants will not make your throat vibrate. Fish, paw, and song have beginning unvoiced consonant sounds.

Your child can listen to and practice voiced and unvoiced beginning consonant sounds through ABCmouse’s variety of activities, including “Ring the Bell.”

Learning Consonant Sounds with ABCmouse

Learning consonants with ABCmouse can be engaging for children—a variety of games, songs, puzzles, and activities allow many opportunities for practice with consonant sounds.

Repetitive practice and repeated exposure is aimed at allowing children to develop automaticity, or the ability to automatically recognize words while reading.

There are many fun activities for learning consonant sounds featured in the ABCmouse curriculum, including the following: • Word Search Games • Spelling Cutout Puzzles • First Letter in Line • Ring the Bell • Alphabet Sounds on the Farm

Do you want to know more about creating an amazing learning experience for your child with ABCmouse’s reading program for kids? Visit ABCmouse.com now!

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Consonant Facts for Kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

For "consonant" in a musical sense see Consonance and dissonance

All the letters in the alphabet are either consonants or vowels. A consonant is a speech sound in which the air is at least partly blocked, and any letter which represents this. Consonants may come singily (by themselves) or in clusters (two or more together), but must be connected to a vowel to form a syllable.

Notice that the consonant (C) and vowel (V) notation does NOT match the letters of English spelling in a one-to-one relationship (e. g. 'th' is one sound), but rather individual sounds.

Words with single consonants include:

• Go (CV), which has one consonant and one vowel in that order
• On (VC), which has one vowel and one consonant in that order
• Ton (CVC), which has a consonant, a vowel, and another consonant in that order

Words with consonant clusters include:

• Pro (CCV), which has two consonants in-a-row and one vowel afterwards
• Old (VCC), which has one vowel and two consonants in-a-row afterwards
• Spree (CCCV), which has three consonants in-a-row and one vowel afterwards
• Arcs (VCCC), which has one vowel and three consonants in-a-row afterwards
• Strengths (CCCVCCCCC), which has three consonants in-a-row, one vowel afterwards, and finally five consonants in a row

Consonants have friction when they are spoken, mostly using the position of the tongue against the lips, teeth and roof of the mouth. b and p are plosives, using the lips to produce a tiny sharp sound. Phonetics texts give more details, with diagrams. Consonants may be voiced or unvoiced. The th in the is voiced, but in breath is not.

• There are 21 consonant letters in English, for 24 consonant sounds in most English accents.^p242 Because of the history of the English language, there is no neat one-to-one relationship between letter and sound. th and ch each stand for a single sound, and x in fox stands for two sounds (ks). All these letters are consonants:

B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, (sometimes Y), and Z. "Y" is often used as a consonant, but it is sometimes used as a vowel. For example, in the word yellow, y is a consonant. But in the word happy, y is a vowel.

• The rest of the letters of the alphabet are called vowels. Vowels are underdone, for there are about 20 vowel sounds in most English accents. ^p237 The vowels are:

A, E, I, O, U (and sometimes Y)

All content from Kiddle encyclopedia articles (including the article images and facts) can be freely used under Attribution-ShareAlike license, unless stated otherwise. Cite this article:

Consonant Facts for Kids. Kiddle Encyclopedia.

Hard and soft consonants. How to determine? Table and examples

Free introductory Russian lesson

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You must have noticed that the same consonant letters can sound different. For example, in the words "childish" and "think" the letter "d" is not the same: we pronounce one softly, and the other firmly. It's time to figure out why this is happening. In this article, we will tell you what hard and soft consonants are and how to determine them so as not to make mistakes in phonetic analysis.

What consonants are called hard and soft

Consonants are those in which there is noise. When we pronounce them, the exhaled air encounters obstacles: the special position of the tongue, lips, teeth, palate. This is where the characteristic consonant sound comes from.

Consonants can be hard or soft, voiced or voiceless.

• Soft consonants - sounds, during the pronunciation of which the middle of the tongue rises, and the tip approaches the teeth.

• Solid consonants are sounds in which the tongue does not make additional movements.

Therefore, we pronounce hard and soft consonants differently. This can be seen if you say, for example, the words autumn and wasps . In the first case, the sound [s'] is soft and will sound appropriate. But in the second word [s] is a solid consonant sound, and this can also be heard from its sound.

Here are some more examples of the same consonants that represent hard and soft sounds.

Interestingly, the hardness or softness of a consonant is related to which vowel follows it. If after the consonant there are letters denoting the hardness of the sound ( a, o, y, s or e ), it will be hard, and if the letters denoting softness ( i, e, e, yu, and or b ), - soft. The exception is some borrowed words, for example pho[ne]tika .

For example:

• soft consonants: [d'e] revo, [v'e] black, when [b'e] reap, [v'a] knowledge, p[r'i] led, [l'u] day , etc. ;

• hard consonants: months [ta], k[ry] sha, [du] mother, [me] r etc.

Test yourself!

Determine which consonant sound is used in these words - [d] or [d']: see, home, winner, businesslike, victory, pest, meditation, bear

Demo lesson in Russian

introductory lesson and find out what topics separate you from the "five" in Russian.

Paired and unpaired consonants in terms of hardness-softness

Consonant sounds form pairs in terms of hardness-softness and are called, respectively, paired. Here is a table of all paired hard and soft consonants.

However, in Russian there are consonants that do not have such a pair: they can only be soft or only hard. Such sounds are called unpaired. For example, consonants [g], [w] and [c] do not have a pair, they are always solid. Even if in the word they are followed by letters that indicate the softness of consonants: i, e, e, u, and or b . For convenience, we collected all paired and unpaired consonants in the memo below. Save and enjoy!

Test Yourself

Test your understanding of hard and soft consonants and letters with the activities below.

Task 1

Name:

• 10 hard consonant words;

• 5 words that always contain hard consonants;

• 10 soft consonant words;

• 5 words with always soft consonants.

Task 2

Read the words below and mark hard consonant sounds in them, and also indicate whether they are paired or unpaired in hardness-softness:

• wind,

• apple,

• grovel,

• Far East,

• approaching,

• cauterize,

• pyramid,

• appearance,

• lure,

• important,

• cyclone,

• athletic,

• interferes.

Literate speech goes hand in hand with knowledge of phonetics. If you need to analyze this topic in detail and not miss the details, we advise you to additionally study with a teacher. In the Skysmart online Russian language school courses, students will be able to immerse themselves in phonetics and figure out which consonants are always hard or always soft, and then consolidate the new on exciting tasks. This will help you understand the topic better and improve your grades in school

Russian cheat sheets for parents

All Russian language rules at hand

table, rule. A child masters hard and soft consonants

Contents

1. How to teach children to distinguish between hard and soft consonants
2. What sound comes after a consonant:
3. Examples of interesting tasks for developing the skill of distinguishing soft and hard consonants
4. when are they solid?
5. Strengthening the ability to distinguish between vowels and consonants and letters
6. A table where all vowels and consonants are collected
7. Hard and soft signs
8. Another useful table of sounds and letters
9. ✍ Guess
10. ✍ Choose hard ones!
11. ✍ Match
12. Tips for parents

How to teach children to distinguish between hard and soft consonants

The very first thing to teach a child is that consonants can be hard and soft, but not letters.

Common mistake:
Children confuse sound and letter. Remember that a sound is a sound, and a letter is an icon, it is written. A letter cannot be hard or soft, only a consonant sound can be hard or soft in pronunciation.

Sometimes children can easily learn to distinguish between soft and hard sounds by ear.
But it happens that this is given with difficulty, and in this case, signs will come to the rescue by which one can distinguish hard sounds from soft ones.

What sound comes after the consonant:

• If the consonant is followed by the vowel a, o, u, e, s, then the consonant is solid.
• If after the consonant there is a vowel i, e, u, i, then the consonant is soft.

Practicing with examples:
In the words "mama", "nora" - solid consonants, because they are followed by "a" and "o".
In the words "fly", "nanny" - soft consonants, because after them come "e", "i", "I".

• If another consonant sounds after a consonant, then the first consonant will be hard.
• There are sounds that can only be hard and sounds that can only be soft, no matter what sound is heard and what letter is written after them.

Always hard sounds - w, w, c.
Always soft - d, h, sh.
A common way to learn these sounds is a simple technique: we write the letters that convey these sounds in a line, and underline "y, h, u". The underline symbolizes the pillow on which soft sounds sit. The pad is soft, so the sounds are soft.

Examples of interesting tasks for developing the skill of distinguishing soft and hard consonants

A picture or just a list of thematic words is shown, and the task is given to choose words with soft or hard consonants.

For example:

When are consonants soft and when are they hard?

Remember:

Always soft consonants: y, h, sh. Their transcription differs, but this option is accepted: [j], [h], [sh ']. Please note: the sounds that give the letters y and h are written without apostrophes

Always solid sounds: [g] , [w] , [c].

In the case of other consonants - if they are followed by vowels e, e, u, i, and or ь, then the consonants will be soft. If the vowels A, O, U, Y, E follow, then the consonants will be hard.

When you have explained the difference between vowels and consonants and letters, be sure to reinforce the formed skill. And play again.

• Together with your child, think of words that start with the given sound on the way from kindergarten.
• Draw a sheet of paper into squares, color them in red and blue, and offer to decompose the letters from the split alphabet into “houses”.
• * Attentive ears game. The instruction is simple: "If the word starts with a vowel - clap, with a consonant - stomp."
• Come up with a recipe for an unusual dish, the ingredients of which only begin with certain sounds.
• When cleaning the apartment, give the task to first remove all the toys that begin with consonants.

Important condition! Systematic and calm.

Your positive attitude will not only teach you to distinguish between vowels and consonants, but also form a desire to learn.

Table where all vowels and consonants are collected

Hard and soft signs

It is important to explain to a first grader that neither0446 b , neither b are related to either vowels or consonants. They are only helpers, making the consonant soft or hard.

Another useful table of sounds and letters. The task of the child is to name the word and name soft sounds.

To start the game, easy words are chosen: [mʻel]; [soap]; [l`uk]; [WHO]. And at the end, you can complicate the task and give the following words: [b`elka]; [ski track]; [cl`on].

While playing, the child visually memorizes the designation of soft consonant sounds and gains practical skills in using knowledge when writing.

✍ Choose hard ones!

A game by analogy with "edible - not edible". In order for the game to interest the attention of children, a ball is used. The teacher lines up the children in a circle and pronounces a syllable, if the consonant is hard, the child catches the ball, and if the consonant is soft, not. After the child has caught the ball, he must independently come up with a new syllable and throw the ball to another player.
The game allows children to quickly distinguish between the hardness and softness of consonants.

✍ Match

Children are given words with the first consonant in hard form, and the child must come up with a word in which the first consonant is soft. For example, the words are given: glad, varnish, soap, cart. And the children should pick up: row, hatch, chalk, drove (if the children come up with other words, but in the correct soft use of the consonant, they must be counted as the correct answer). If the child comes up with a few words, it is necessary to praise him.
This game develops a child's imagination and expands their vocabulary as children share written words.

Advice for parents

The most important piece of advice to give parents of a child who is concerned about their development is to worry less. Most childhood problems are contrived, especially when it comes to the first child.

If a child does not understand the difference between soft and hard sounds before most children learn the letters, this is also not a cause for concern.

If a child fails to learn to distinguish sounds when others do it easily and quickly, and it is not possible to cope with the problem on his own, then it may be more effective to contact a specialist. In this case, a speech therapist will help more than a language teacher. It is important for the baby not to memorize sounds, but to learn to distinguish them. This can be done only by understanding the nature of the origin of sounds. Who, if not a speech therapist, will explain this in all details and subtleties, using a large base of exercises and experience.

Another important step towards understanding the nature of sounds is the creation of appropriate conditions for learning activities. Often it is this factor that does not allow children to learn at all, let alone begin to understand sounds.

Mental operations require not only the presence of educational didactic material, but also a suitable place for classes. Those who think otherwise simply underestimate the importance of a separate table and chair that belongs only to the baby. At his own workplace, the baby not only feels older, but also begins to understand the responsibility entrusted to him, and also has a different attitude to the learning process.

However, this does not mean that the element of play should be removed from training. Sometimes it is no less important than realizing the seriousness of what is happening. For example, folding a mosaic of the same colored cards is more convenient and interesting on the floor, where you can sit perfectly on the carpet, which is also a border.

Children really need boundaries and rules. They not only discipline, but also allow you to gain confidence in the future and your strengths. After all, children know what awaits them within these boundaries and rules, as well as what will follow their violation. Confidence is another important component of success!

And the last way to learn hard and soft sounds on your own is to buy or make cards with syllables. They are sold in all bookstores. These are bright and convenient didactic materials, the effectiveness of which has been confirmed by thousands of parents and teachers. If you do not have the opportunity or desire to buy these cards, you can make them yourself or with the help of a child.

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