3.2 Explicitly Teaching Letter Names and Sounds

When you’re ready to teach, we hope you’ll consider using our lesson plans for teaching sound-letter correspondence. Our research-based plans combine instruction of letter names, letter sounds, articulation, and letter formation.

Here’s a sample lesson plan for introducing the letter ‘b’. It includes carefully sequenced activities and goes in-depth on the skills.

Introducing the Letter ‘Bb’

This lesson plan includes warm-up phonemic awareness activities and all the steps needed to introduce a new letter. A good resource for kindergarten teachers or anyone working on new sounds with early readers.

But here's the big picture. We begin by teaching students how to connect letter sounds (something they already know from oral language) with the visual representation of the letter — going from speech to print. Then, we teach them how to write the letter correctly. By the end of the lesson, your students should be able to recognize, read, and write a new letter!

Teacher Tip

When students are first learning the letters of the alphabet, we teach the upper and lowercase letters at the same time. In addition, when we teach students to write the letter, we teach them how to form the upper and lowercase letter. Once a letter has been explicitly taught and students have had multiple opportunities to practice naming and writing both the upper and lowercase letters, we shift our focus to representing sounds and words with only lowercase letters. That’s because we read and write lowercase letters much more often than we do uppercase letters.

And here’s a brief look at the sequence of activities in the lesson:

1. Warm up with a phonological awareness activity to get students hearing sounds. You might sing the alphabet and have students point to each letter on an alphabet chart.
2. Explicitly tell students what new letter and sound you will be teaching them. Show the letter, model the sound, have students repeat. For example, “The name of this letter is ‘b’. It makes the sound /b/. Everybody say, /b/."
3. Talk about how the sound is made and what the mouth looks and feels like when making it. “When we say /b/, your lips come together and then pop open. This is a lip popper!”
4. Play with words that start with the new sound. For instance, say big, baby, boy and have students punch the air when they hear the /b/ sound.
5. Show students the letter card with a keyword picture. The ‘b’ card, for example, has a bat. This will help them remember the new sound. Say ‘b’, bat, /b/.
6. Write the letter. Show students how to form it on paper. Practice writing it in the air. Talk about how the letter is formed. 
7. Have students write the letter. After writing it, they should read the sounds back.
8. Provide opportunities for independent practice. Use games and make practice fun!