Sounds with Letters
One of the things I learned in parenthood is that teaching your kids how to read is difficult. I think that teaching kids to recognize letters without the corresponding sound makes it much more difficult to put those concepts together as they get older. It was through observation and experience that led me to this conclusion.
When my 7 year old daughter E was much younger, she knew the alphabet at an early age. She never wanted to say them out loud, but one faithful July 4th day, she said the entire alphabet in order out of nowhere. It was better than any fireworks display I could have seen. My wife and I were so surprised. From there, she slowly learned the sounds to the letters a few years later. She is a fantastic reader now, but the jump to phonetics was difficult at first. It was filled with frustration and some emotionally charged reading sessions. Now E is breezing through chapter books and all is well on that front.
My 5 year old son C stuck by his big sister E. He wanted to do everything she was doing, including learning how to read. He got a jump start into phonetics because he was just observing us (mainly my wife) teaching E how to read. The time that elapsed from learning letters to connecting them to the phonetic sounds was much shorter. Potentially years shorter. His reading skills are very high as a result and we didn’t have to teach him much since he learned through osmosis.
With my 1 year old son L, I’m teaching him phonetics while learning the letters. He pretty much has the letter recognition down and up to half of the letter sounds mapped in his brain. We read this Hello World - Pets book at night frequently. I spend an embarrassing amount of time on the title to teach him how to read the word pets. I ask him what each letter is and after each letter, I ask him what sound that letter makes. He can get all of them right and then I just slide our fingers across the letters while making the sounds to mimic reading. In my head, I feel like he knows how to read that word at this point, but I could definitely be imagining things.
Parenting takes reps, observation, and a willingness to commit the time to try new things. It’s the hardest and most rewarding thing that I have encountered. Even though there are periods where things are hard, those times pass and I find a lot of value in teaching my kids the many things they need to learn in life. I’m excited to see if my experiment here leads to a different outcome for L and in general, it can’t hurt to start things early if they are ready!
