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How can one start at the beginning, you may be wondering. "Start" and "beginning" kinda mean the same thing, right?

In keeping with our mission here at Reading Simplified- streamlined instruction, accelerated achievement -I propose you skip the beginning stage of traditional reading instruction: teaching letter sounds in isolation.

Instead, jump to teaching letter sounds in context-in the context of real reading.

I wager with you: If you try the technique described below, your beginning readers will learn to read faster.

Typical Teaching of Letter Sounds

Imagine what happens every morning in most 4K, K or 1 st grade classrooms in U.S. classes. Teachers are encouraged to hold up, point to, or highlight on their SMART board a letter and teach its name and often its sound. Perhaps several letters will be reviewed. The letters may be contextualized into real words, ideally in a multi-sensory way, yet the focus of the lesson will be on the letter alone, as in

and, at best, on its position in the beginning of a word:

Most curricula and teachers assume that before a child can learn to read, she has to learn the letter names and their sounds.

THEN real reading can start.
Is that true? Is that the most efficient plan?
Our experience working with hundreds of beginning and struggling readers says,

How to Teach Letter Sounds from the Beginning

Instead of teaching letter names or letter sounds in isolation first, we guide both beginners and struggling readers how to build one word at a time using manipulatives- . Yes, first even if they do not yet know the letter names or sounds.

Here are some of the steps of Build It that allows the teacher to skip past letter names in isolation:
Destinee, what do you hear in this spot in the word, 'ssssssssat'? Yes, that's right this sound (tapping space) in "sssssat" is /s-/. Do you know which of these (tapping letter-sounds) is /s-/?
Even if Destinee has never had formal reading instruction, she has a 1 in 3 chance of getting the teacher's question right.
Multiple choice is easier.
It's one way to scaffold her learning. Suppose she doesn't know which letter is /s/. The teacher can simply say,

No, this (tapping the "s" tile/square) is /s-/, as in the word, "ssssat."

Then Destinee will move the "s" square into the first line and the teacher will repeat her questioning cycle:
Great! Now listen for the sound you hear in this spot (tapping 2 What sound do you hear? Yes, that's right this sound (tapping space) in "ssssaaaat" is /a-/. Do you know which of these (tapping letter-sounds) is /a-/? Yes! Pull down the /a-/ and say it as you move it. spot), when I say, /sssa--t/ (exaggerating and elongating the short "a" sound).
Now the task is getting easier and easier. The teacher can ask Destinee to finish building the word, "sat."

She ends by saying each sound separately (phonemic segmentation) as she points to each:/sss/ /a-/ /t/.

The same coaching through the word can continue with Destinee or with a handful of students in small group instruction. These students will be learning the letter-sounds in a multi-sensory way, but that's not all!

They will also be learning these other fundamental skills:

How our written language code works (the alphabetic principle)

How to segment words into phonemes (individual sounds)

Left-to-write scanning (a concept about print)

This simultaneous integration of multiple beginning skills makes the instructional time much more efficient. See our previous blog post, " Integrate, Don't Isolate " for more about the benefits of integrating multiple skills.

And, yet, I don't find that this approach simply reduces instructional time.

More importantly, this approach, which we call Build It, moves directly toward a real literacy behavior-spelling real words. Since it's more like real reading, it makes more sense to young learners, especially those who would otherwise struggle with reading.

Teaching any new skill in the natural context in which it occurs is usually more effective for learning's sake.

Watch this beginning 4 year-old as she tries to build the word, "sad." Notice all the reading sub-skills she is putting all together in the context of a meaningful word simultaneously

Teach Letter-Sounds in Context

Imagine a tennis instructor who begins the first several weeks of instruction by simply showing and practicing how to toss the ball for a serve.

What if he modeled how it related to serving himself (as in when a teacher reads "p" words), but he doesn't ever allow the beginner to try to serve?
How high should they toss it? How will they know if it's a good toss?
Yes, practicing a toss in isolation at times may be beneficial, but to begin tennis instruction with just that in isolation will delay many future players.
"at-risk"
Without a system for getting feedback, this approach at learning how to serve or how to begin in tennis, will be very inefficient. And those players who have seen little or no real tennis before will be especially
So goes beginning reading instruction as well.
of getting little or nothing out of the experience of tossing a ball in the air over and over again. All of that info about the experience may even be "filed" away in the their brains in the wrong place because the isolated activity has little or nothing to do with the relevant context of tennis.

Teach letter-sounds in the context of real words for spelling and reading and children will more likely:

Learn the letter-sounds more quickly,

Store the information about the letter-sounds in the part of the brain most connected to reading, and

Not miss completely the point of the teacher's instruction!

Skip the traditional beginning weeks or months of reading instruction and jump right into Build It. However, since this technique is so counter-cultural, you may have doubts....You may doubt whether your K or 1st grade students with limited literacy exposure could handle such a big jump.

You may be surprised to discover that traditional Montessori classrooms have been guiding their 3 and 4 year-old students to begin reading and writing instruction this way for over 100 years-in the context of real words and sentences. Somehow I never learned about the Montessori techniques when I earned my master's in education. Thankfully, my mother-in-law tuned me into it when her first grandchild (yes, my first-born daughter) needed to find a good pre-school. What a difference that approach made to our daughter's ease of learning to read!

In case you still doubt, here's an example of an advanced 3 year-old doing an activity much like our Build It.

If Montessori children can handle reading and building words at age 3 or 4, is it possible that your student, no matter how limited her experience, could tackle it at 5?

If you're wondering what the theoretical or research communities have to say about the value of teaching letter-sounds, phonemic awareness, and reading all together, here are some biggies:
Please try Build It with a beginning student! And please let me know what questions or concerns you have before trying this approach.

1. The National Reading Panel concluded in its Phonemic Awareness meta-analysis that phonemic awareness instruction combined with decoding was more powerful than phonemic awareness instruction without letters.

2. Some researchers have tested the isolation vs. integration question directly. An early study on this by Peter Hatcher, Charles Hulme, and Andrew Ellis can be found here. Briefly: reading + phonemic awareness instruction > than either phonemic awareness or reading instruction alone.

3. A past president of the International Literacy Association and chair of the National Early Literacy Panel, Tim Shanahan, indicates here that the National Reading Panel "concluded that phonemic awareness and phonics both needed to be taught and that they could and should clearly be connected."

4. The ultra-scholarly among us can read deeply into the theory undergirding the Build It approach with Dr. David Share's "self-teaching hypothesis."

Or, if you have tried it, were there any sticking points?

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Teach the Letter-Sounds with Multiple Early Reading Skills-Build It - Reading Simplified

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How can one start at the beginning, you may be wondering. "Start" and "beginning" kinda mean the same thing, right? In keeping with our mission here at Reading Simplified- streamlined instruction, accelerated achievement -I propose you skip the beginning stage of traditional reading instruction: teaching letter sounds in isolation.

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Several months ago I was visiting a preschool classroom and the teacher asked me a question based on her bi-annual PALS assessment. The assessment includes phonological (sound-based language) awareness, letter name, and letter sound knowledge.

She and her co-teacher both observed some quirky responses but didn't understand the root. She wondered:
"Why do several children say, /w/ for the letter 'y'?"
Think about the sounds we say when we say the letter name for "y" = /why/. How would you have responded to this teacher? Here's the route I took:

"Those children have first learned the letter name of 'y' and they hear the first sound in the letter name 'y'= /w/. They know sounds are important but they do not know that sometimes the letter name has nothing to do with the sound the letter usually makes."

The Two Worldviews Dilemma: Letter Names vs. Letter Sounds

This scenario reveals a critical problem in the teaching of young children that can be drastically improved if we guide pre-K and early elementary teachers to enter into the child's worldview.
Pause for a moment and consider what it means that
Several of the children said /w/ for "y"

Both preschool teachers could not reason why they produced this error.

The children, as novice readers, had a worldview centered around sounds. They expected that that letters related to the sounds they heard in words, so they thought about the sounds they heard in the word, "y" (/why/) and responded with the first sound in the word /why/.

On the other hand, the teachers, as adult readers, had a worldview so centered around letters and letter names that both could not even perceive that the first in the name of the letter was what triggered the students' responses.

Both worldviews are appropriate for their respective stages as readers.

Beginning readers need to especially attend to sounds in words and learn how sounds map onto symbols. This is how our written code works-letters and letter combinations represent sounds in words.

Similarly, mature, adult readers have advanced well beyond this close attention to the sounds in words. They still rely on sound-based decoding to read unusual words, but most of the time they recognize words on sight and when they spell, they often think in letter names.

Nonetheless, this gap in worldviews is a major problem for contemporary beginning reading instruction.

We can begin to resolve the gap between the child and the teacher's worldviews by moving, as teachers, towards the worldview of the child:
Think about the sounds in words.
Throw out your thinking of letter names and perceive, again, the that you hear in words. Read a sentence in a children's book and think about the sounds in each word:

"'I'm going to like working here,'" said Amelia Bedelia."

What sounds make up the words "I'm" and "going?"

/i/ /m/ and /g//oa/ /i/ /ng/

Ever stopped to think about the /ng/ sound? Try saying it aloud. It kinda comes through your nose. !!

If hearing the individual sounds in each word like this doesn't come naturally to you, challenge yourself to think more about it in the next few days. Hear a word and ponder its individual sounds. For example, what are the sounds in the word, "though"?

Hint: there's only 2.

A Quick Solution: Manipulatives by Letter-Sound

One of the best ways in our classrooms to enter into the child's worldview and attend better to the sounds in words is to use manipulatives that stress the sound and not the letter name. Thus, use tiles, card squares, or special color to show that each sound is a separate entity.

Try: th i s instead of t h a t

We have scoured the world of reading programs and manipulatives and the vast majority treat sounds and letters erratically.

Some sounds are accurately perceived as one unit as in "sh" on one tile. But then the same company will put "bl" on one tile as well, even though it is two sounds. This type of company is living in the adult, letter-name focused world and that shows up in their lack of consistency.

Enter into the child's world of sound, instead.

Here are some visuals to show a variety ways of representing sounds rather than letters (including the non-example of "blah"):

We use these letter-sounds cards to teach beginning letter-sound knowledge with an activity called Build It, which I wrote about here. That's a great beginning activity for pre-K and beginning K readers. For everyone, however, we always use these letter-sound cards for Switch It, which is described with a video example here.

Also, especially for children first learning the ins and outs of our code, we often use texts that have been coded, as in the example from our "My Dog Nick" passage below. The "th" in "this, "the "ck" in "black" and "Nick" and the "oo" in "good" are bolded to show the young reader that those letter-sounds combinations represent one sound. Children don't need this scaffold for long; however, it is helpful for the first few weeks (sometimes months) to help them recognize more of the 250 letter-sound combinations 😮 our English code has. Finally, besides the 3-D manipulatives you use, also be wary of the digital reading tools your students use for learning how to decode. So many of them ignore or misunderstand the sound-driven logic of English.

And please let us know:

What trips you up when you move from the adult letter-bound world to the child's sound-driven world?

Thanks for joining in the conversation in the comments below!

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Several months ago I was visiting a preschool classroom and the teacher asked me a question based on her bi-annual PALS assessment. The assessment includes phonological (sound-based language) awareness, letter name, and letter sound knowledge. She and her co-teacher both observed some quirky responses but didn't understand the root.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LetterSchool - Learn the world to write and read! You've already learned where to start, change direction and finish. In this game, the trick is to trace the letter correctly all the way to the end. A stunning reward awaits you-and your second star to boot. Now hop on to the ultimate challenge...