Practice and Learn Identifying Individual Letter Sounds

Ask a partner to practice teaching this strategy with you! You will take the role of teacher, and your partner will take the role of student. Then you’ll switch roles with a new set of letters. If you don’t have a partner, play around with both roles; and be sure to practice the strategies out loud, just as you would in real life with a student. 

Partners, remember to make a few errors during the roleplay so that you can practice including errors in your notes!

Let's practice how to teach letters names and sounds.

1. Pull out your flash card deck and select the following cards: 

'm', 's', 'f', 't', 'a'

2. Practice teaching beginning decoding skills for each letter. 

Here’s an example. 

Holding up the letter card for ‘m’, you’ll say, 

The name of this letter is 'm'. 

It makes the sound /m/. 

Say it with me, /m/. 

Student repeats, 

/m/ 

Ask,

What sound does the 'm' make? 

Student says, 

/m/

Say,

When we see the letter 'm', we say /m/ as in moon.

Model and ask,

'm', moon, /m/

What's the sound?

Student says, 

'm', moon, /m/

Follow the same process for each letter in your deck. 

3. Review and practice. Go back through the letter cards at a lively pace as you ask your partner to produce the sound and identify the letters by asking:

What's the sound?

Spread the cards on the table and ask your partner to show you the letter that represents a sound. 

You might say, 

Show me the /_/ sound.

4. Switch roles with your partner! Pull out a new set of letter cards and repeat the steps above with: 

'p', 'n', 'r', 'c', 'o'

Great job! Keep going to learn fun and engaging strategies for teaching children how to blend letter sounds to read and spell words!