Letter and sounds

Help Your Child Learn Alphabet Sounds!

Teaching Tips

December 15, 2020

0

4 mins

Alphabet knowledge is one of the first building blocks of education, the moment when children begin learning the letters of the alphabet. As the stepping stones of language, learning the alphabet is one of the first ways we develop the skills necessary to read and write. In fact, studies show that the ability to name the letters of the alphabet during Pre-K and kindergarten is a well-established predictor of children's literacy skills later in life. Properly knowing the alphabet means that the child can distinguish between the 26 letters of the alphabet and can also verbalize those letter sounds. There are many different ways to approach teaching the alphabet, and because every child is different, multiple teaching methods should be considered to ensure that all students are on the same path toward mastering letter sounds. 

Tips for Teaching Letter Sounds

Many factors play a role in a child’s quest toward learning the alphabet. When teaching letter sounds, it's important to consider that students have varied learning styles. It is best to use a combination of visual, tactile, and auditory strategies in order to reach learners most effectively. Taking advantage of all possible approaches and beginning at an appropriate pace for the age group is key for making sure the child has learned the alphabet.  

Preschool vs Kindergarten

Establishing the child’s starting point is crucial for properly knowing where to begin in regards to the child learning letter sounds. In Pre-K, students are beginning to establish phonemic awareness, and these skills can grow quickly. By establishing the learner’s baseline, you are able to help them achieve greater growth throughout their Pre-K and kindergarten years. 

Start With Their Name

Taking full advantage of meaningful literacy during early childhood education is a great way to connect lessons with the student in an intimate and fun way. Starting with teaching the child’s name guarantees that there will be a personal connection to the letters of the alphabet and teaching the letter sounds of their name will help them to remember certain letters and touch on correct letter order as well. Start with their name and then move on to other personal buzzwords such as their favorite food, color, and so on.  

Capital Letters First

When teaching letter sounds, children typically learn capital letters first so it’s much easier for them to recognize capital letters than lowercase letters. When using visual materials for teaching letter sounds, begin with mastering capital letters of the alphabet and then move forward to incorporate lowercase letters as well. This allows them to have a foundation for letter sounds while then focusing on letter recitation overall.  

Use Visual Cues

Visual cues are a huge helping hand in the quest for properly teaching alphabet letters and sounds. Combining verbal and visual instruction to provide aid for the child allows them to commit the letters to memory and recall those letters later on. Consider using physically engaging alphabet resources to help give kids visual assistance in learning letters and sounds. Some great tools we suggest include:  

Letters or Letter Sounds First?

Each student is unique! Some children will have an easier time identifying the letter, while others may have a better time learning the sound before the corresponding letter. Take note of which direction the child is leaning toward and cater to their individual needs. But first and foremost, ensure you invest a healthy amount of time in establishing letter-sound-correspondence when teaching letters and sounds.  

Mix Up the Standard Alphabet Order

A great way to ensure that the student is properly able to identify and replicate alphabet letter sounds is to change up the alphabet order. This allows the teacher to see if the student has retained the alphabet properly or has maybe relied heavily on educational tools like songs and games to be able to identify letters. A-B-C Touch & Flip Cards are a great tool for mixing up the order to ensure each letter gets its own spotlight and that the child can confidently excel in mastering the alphabet.  

Make Letter Sounds Fun

One of the best parts of teaching letter alphabet sounds is watching the moment when it finally clicks for the child. Teaching letter sounds should be a fun experience for the child. That positivity helps encourage comprehension and encourages further development of these skills. Try playing games, singing catchy alphabet songs, or even assigning alphabet-based art assignments to help make learning the alphabet a fun experience.   

Learning Without Tears Knows Letter Sounds!

Once a child has confidently mastered letter sounds and the alphabet, they’ve taken the first step toward literacy, vocabulary, language development, and more. With a combination of enriching alphabet learning materials and enough consistent practice, any child will be on their way to confidently know the alphabet. 

Learning Without Tears seeks to help families, educators, and children get prepared for learning with innovative educational materials and professional resources. We want every child to be set up for success through each step of their learning journey, with engaging and worthwhile materials for K-5 students. Regardless of whether the child is learning in a traditional classroom or at home, Learning Without Tears provides access to proven curricula, industry insight, and enriching products that help make teaching and learning the alphabet a fun experience.  

Source: Piasta, Petscher & Justice, 2012 

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Learning Letter Sounds - PreKinders

By Karen Cox | Affiliate Disclosure | Filed Under: Phonological Awareness

These games help pre-K children practice Letter Sound learning in a fun, hands-on way.

Sound Cups

Use 26 disposable clear punch cups and label each cup with a letter. Letter cup labels can be downloaded below. Collect a set of small trinket objects (you can ask parents and friends to send things in), such as plastic lizard, small block, watch, plastic frog, bandaid, necklace, button, dice. Place the trinkets in a basket. Children sort each trinket into a letter cup by its beginning sound.

You can use all 26 cups at one time, or select 3-4 letter cups at a time for children to focus on. When searching for items to go in the cups, look for dollar store mini toys (especially packs of animals and bugs), look at doll house miniatures, browse craft stores for mini items.

Download: Letter Cup Labels

Erase the Sound

Draw a picture on a dry erase lap board. In the example below, I drew a snowman. Call children up one at the time to erase something that begins with something in the picture. In this picture, children can erase something that begins with H (hat), something that begins with B (buttons), something that begins with N (nose). Continue until everything is erased.

Mystery Bag

Place three objects beginning with the same letter in a bag (such as ball, bug, and button for B). Have a  child pulls each item out of the bag and name each item. Have the class guess the “mystery letter”.

Guess Who?

Say three words and have the kids guess whose name begins with the same sound as those three words. For example, call out:

• lake
• lemon
• lamp

The class would guess Levi. If you have more than one child in your class (maybe Levi, Lucy, and Layton) who start with that letter sound, the class can name all of them.

I have prepared a list of words for each letter that you can use for your students. Download the list below.

Download: Beginning Letter Sounds List

Monster Names

Have kids stand, stomp, and growl when you say their “Monster Name”. Replace the first letter of each child’s name with the letter M. For example, Braden’s name would become “Mad Monster Maden” and Ashlyn’s name would become “Mad Monster Mashlyn”.

Say Two Words

Say two words, and have kids stand up if the words begin with the same sound. Have them sit down if they do not. For example,
cat – cow (stand up)
hat – goat (sit down)

Letter Sounds Listening Games

Children listen for beginning sounds in words and use bingo markers to stamp a letter each time they hear the letter sound. Get the printable game here: Letter Sounds Listening Games.

Letter Sounds Activity Cards

Children look at the picture, say the word, and find the letter that matches the beginning sound. They mark the cards by clipping it or marking it with a chip. Get the printable game here: Letter Sounds Activity Cards.

Letter Tile Mats

Children match letter tiles to the pictures on the mats by identifying the beginning sound of the words. Get the printable game here: Letter Tile Mats.

More Resources

These are available in my shop.

About Karen Cox

Karen is the founder of PreKinders. com. She also works as a full-time Pre-K teacher in Georgia. Read more...

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Sounds and letters of the Russian language - scheme, table, transcription

Contents:
• What is sound?
• What sounds are there?
• How are sounds pronounced?
• Transcription of the word
• Color scheme

Sounds belong to the phonetics section. The study of sounds is included in any school curriculum in the Russian language. Acquaintance with sounds and their main characteristics occurs in the lower grades. A more detailed study of sounds with complex examples and nuances takes place in middle and high school. This page provides only basic knowledge of the sounds of the Russian language in a compressed form. If you need to study the device of the speech apparatus, the tonality of sounds, articulation, acoustic components and other aspects that are beyond the scope of the modern school curriculum, refer to specialized textbooks and textbooks on phonetics.

What is sound?

Sound, like words and sentences, is the basic unit of language. However, the sound does not express any meaning, but reflects the sound of the word. Thanks to this, we distinguish words from each other. Words differ in the number of sounds (port - sport, crow - funnel), set of sounds (lemon - estuary, cat - mouse), sequence of sounds (nose - dream, bush - knock) up to a complete mismatch of sounds (boat - boat, forest - park ).

What sounds are there?

In Russian, sounds are divided into vowels and consonants. There are 33 letters and 42 sounds in Russian: 6 vowels, 36 consonants, 2 letters (ь, ъ) do not indicate a sound. The discrepancy in the number of letters and sounds (not counting b and b) is due to the fact that there are 6 sounds for 10 vowels, 36 sounds for 21 consonants (if we take into account all combinations of consonant sounds deaf / voiced, soft / hard). On the letter, the sound is indicated in square brackets.
There are no sounds: [e], [e], [yu], [i], [b], [b], [g '], [w '], [c '], [th], [h ], [sch].

How are sounds pronounced?

We pronounce sounds while exhaling (only in the case of the interjection "a-a-a", expressing fear, the sound is pronounced while inhaling.). The division of sounds into vowels and consonants is related to how a person pronounces them. Vowel sounds are pronounced by the voice due to the exhaled air passing through the tense vocal cords and freely exiting through the mouth. Consonant sounds consist of noise or a combination of voice and noise due to the fact that the exhaled air meets an obstacle in its path in the form of a bow or teeth. Vowel sounds are pronounced loudly, consonant sounds are muffled. A person is able to sing vowel sounds with his voice (exhaled air), raising or lowering the timbre. Consonant sounds cannot be sung, they are pronounced equally muffled. Hard and soft signs do not represent sounds. They cannot be pronounced as an independent sound. When pronouncing a word, they affect the consonant in front of them, make it soft or hard.

Transcription of a word

Transcription of a word is a recording of sounds in a word, that is, in fact, a record of how the word is pronounced correctly. Sounds are enclosed in square brackets. Compare: a is a letter, [a] is a sound. The softness of consonants is indicated by an apostrophe: p - letter, [p] - hard sound, [p '] - soft sound. Voiced and voiceless consonants are not marked in writing. The transcription of the word is written in square brackets. Examples: door → [dv'er '], thorn → [kal'uch'ka]. Sometimes stress is indicated in transcription - an apostrophe before a vowel stressed sound.

There is no clear correspondence between letters and sounds. In the Russian language, there are many cases of substitution of vowel sounds depending on the place of stress of a word, substitution of consonants or dropping out of consonant sounds in certain combinations. When compiling a transcription of a word, the rules of phonetics are taken into account.

Color scheme

In phonetic parsing, words are sometimes drawn with color schemes: letters are painted with different colors depending on what sound they mean. Colors reflect the phonetic characteristics of sounds and help you visualize how a word is pronounced and what sounds it consists of.

All vowels (stressed and unstressed) are marked with a red background. Iotated vowels are marked green-red: green means a soft consonant sound [y ‘], red means the vowel following it. Consonants with solid sounds are colored blue. Consonants with soft sounds are colored green. Soft and hard signs are painted in gray or not painted at all.

- vowel, - vowel iot - hard consonant, - soft consonant, - soft or hard consonant, - does not mean a sound.

The blue-green color is not used in the schemes for phonetic analysis, since a consonant cannot be both soft and hard at the same time. The blue-green color in the table above is only used to show that the sound can be either soft or hard.

Words with the letter ё must be written through ё. Phonetic parsing of the words "everything" and "everything" will be different!

Vowel sounds and letters. How many are there in Russian?

Free introductory lesson in Russian

Enroll

The correct pronunciation of words is one of the components of a beautiful and literate speech. To achieve this, you will first have to study the sounds themselves. In this article, we will figure out together what vowel sounds are, how many vowels are in the alphabet of the Russian language, and what sounds they can represent.

What are vowels and sounds

Vowel sounds are those sounds that we freely convey with our voice. Hence their name comes from: voice means "voice". When pronouncing, air exits through the mouth and does not create noise, and the position of the tongue and lips determines which vowel sound we will pronounce.

There are much fewer vowels in Russian than consonants. There are 6 of them in total: [a], [o], [i], [s], [y] and [e]. To understand whether a vowel sound is in front of you or not, try to sing it. For example:

• a-a-a ,

• woo

• s-s-s .

If it works, then the sound is a vowel. You can't do that with consonants.

There are more vowels than sounds - there are 10 of them: a, i, u, u, o, e, e, e, i, s . This difference is due to the fact that some of these letters can represent two sounds and are pronounced using a combination of a vowel and a consonant [y']. For example, in word spruce the letter e expresses two sounds - [y'] and [e]. Let's look at the table all the vowel sounds and the letters that represent them.

Demo lesson in Russian

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

How vowel sounds are related to syllables

Vowel sounds form syllables - sound segments of words that we pronounce with one breath. One syllable can be either a vowel with one or more consonants, or a vowel alone. There is even a rule by which syllables can be counted: how many vowels in a word - so many syllables.

For example, in the word journey there are 5 vowels: [u], [i], [e], [i] and [e]. This means that it has 5 syllables: p-te-she-stvi-e .

Test yourself!

Count the number of syllables in the words: try on, tanner, well-groomed, care, prefix, capital, wet, invitation, orange .

Vowel sounds and stress

Now let's see what groups vowel sounds are divided into. Sometimes their pronunciation depends on whether the stress falls on them, that is, whether we single them out with our voice. So vowel sounds are divided into stressed and unstressed. Here are some examples:

Stress in Russian can fall on any of the existing vowel sounds. However, only 4 of them can be unstressed - these are [a], [i], [y] and [s]. In this position, we pronounce sounds weaker than under stress, because of which they can change qualities and sound differently.

Interestingly, the vowels [o] and [e] can only be stressed. There are only a couple of exceptions to this rule: for example, in words cocoa and canoe sounds [o] and [e] in an unstressed position.

How unstressed vowels are related to consonants

How an unstressed vowel sounds depends on the consonant that precedes it. Or rather, from its hardness or softness. If it is a hard consonant, it can be followed by unstressed vowels [y], [a] and [s]. When we talk about a soft consonant, it is followed by unstressed vowels [y] and [and].

Test yourself

It's time to find out if you now understand well what vowel sounds are in Russian. To do this, we have prepared tasks for self-examination.

Task 1

List all the vowels in these words:

Task 2

Name 5 words each in which the sounds [a], [i], [y] and [s] would be in a stressed position.

Task 3

Name 5 words in which an unstressed vowel would come after a hard consonant, and 5 more words where it would follow a soft consonant.

Task 4

Count the number of syllables in the words below (don't forget to use the rule you learned at the beginning of the article!):

• weightless,

• sunrise,

• adventure,

• painter,

• perpetuate,

• nice,

• image,

• category,

• exciting,

• melting,

• snowflake.

The rules of phonetics help us to speak correctly, so it is important to master the topic of vowels well and avoid gaps in knowledge.

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