Learn to Read the Trickiest Letters in the Alphabet

Letter Knowledge to Learn To Read

Teaching both letters AND letter sounds simultaneously are highly useful for reading and writing acquisition. However, there needs to be a system in place. You don’t want to throw the whole alphabet at a child to digest at the same time. Furthermore, you should not teach it in a haphazard way.

The foundation of learning to read is to have children master each letter and sound. When you start adding letter combinations like digraphs, dipthongs, vowel teams, etc. it will be extremely difficult and confusing for children if they do not have the basics.

Recommended Letter Order

First and foremost, you never want to teach the letters in ABC order. One of the first songs that most children learn is the ABC song which gives them the letters in order.  This is wonderful, however, if you teach the letters out of order, you are ensuring they have mastered them.  Many students begin Kindergarten and when asked “what is this letter” and need to sing the ABC song to identify the letter correctly.

The first letter to begin when teaching your child is with the child’s name. Every child LOVES to be able to write their own name on a sheet of paper.  The pride your child feels in their identity is so important from the beginning. After that, the order in which I teach them is based on phonemes.

(Phonemes are the meaning of a letter and your “mouth move” is signaled by each letter.)

Letter Sequencing

When you look at spelling a word, the sequence gives you a “road map” which is the phoneme sequence.  Reading is following this road map of phonemes and you have to understand the map in order to read the word. If that sounds confusing, do not worry, it will make sense in the explanation below.

Recommended Letter Order 

m, t, a, s, d, i, f, r, th, l, o, n, p, e, h, v, sh, u, b, k, ck, c, g, j, w, ch, tch, x, z, qu, wh, y

I know you see digraphs (two sounds that when put together make a unique sound) mixed in there (th, sh, ck, ch, tch, wh). It is important to teach these digraphs early as well. This is due to so many words with these digraphs in early reader books. Practicing them helps build sight word fluency to be able to identify them pronounce them correctly (ex. the, this, she, duck, cheese, watch, when, where, why).

As you introduce the letter and phoneme to a child as they learn to read, you are going to dissect each one like a scientist.  Put on your proverbial scientists hats and goggles on and explore each letter phoneme explicitly.  Have your child experiment with the sound with their mouth. This takes time and practice for correct pronunciation.

Why you Absolutely MUST “Cut off” the ABC’s

It is VITAL you do not teach the sound and attach a vowel. Ex. the letter C is /k/ not /kuh/. You have to cut off the extra vowel phoneme or eventually when they start sounding out words in writing, they will have trouble differentiating the sounds.

In order to attach meaning to a letter and sound, you must make a meaningful connection to the real world. For each child, their environmental surroundings are different.

For example, most children have heard a baby cry, so associating /a/ with the sound and a picture of a crying baby will help the child make the connection. However, if you live in the desert, you would not use the association of an avalanche with the letter “a”.

Lowercase First When you Learn to Read

I also recommend teaching lowercase letters and then uppercase.  For some reason, the American educational system is attached to teaching uppercase.  When you Google alphabet printables, many of them are uppercase alphabets.  However, 95% of the written English language is lowercase.  If you are teaching your child to read in Arabic or Mandarin, you do not have this literacy dilemma.

Since 95% of the letters in written text is lower case, it makes sense to learn to read using lower case. Capital letters take more pencil strokes than lower case (ex. “A” is three strokes, whereas “a” is one stroke without having to lift the pencil.) You want your early writer to feel like their strokes flow together, which is not the case with capital letters.

The paradigm shift with lower case letters will be harder in the short term. However, in the long run, they are faster and more efficient to write.  While your child is learning to read, you want them to recognize how good literature is written. This is the opposite in commercials/advertisements which rely heavily on capital letters.

Phonological Awareness (Hearing and Making Sounds)

When children are babies; you may wonder if it even matters to teach a child how to hear and make sounds. When you study neurological research about sounds, you find that babies can hear the world in a very different way than older children and in adulthood.

We as adults often take for granted our abilities to sort out and prioritize the sounds we hear.  If you have ever studied a foreign language as a beginner, you know that when you first begin listening to the language being spoken, you cannot decipher individual words, or even sounds sometimes.

The human voice can produce at least 150 phonemes (speech sounds), and English only uses about 40 sounds.  

Whole Brain Learning

Researchers are still in the ground-breaking phase of studying all the mechanisms of the brain that lead to language development.  Let’s not forget however, there is a great deal more data now that shows infants innate predispositions, and their incredible abilities to learn once exposed to natural language.

Infants who are less than 1-year-old are able to discover the sounds and words used in their particular language(s) whereas the most sophisticated computers still cannot.

A young child’s ability to express emotion, empathy, and thoughts through words is a breathtaking feat that only a human brain can accomplish. There are complex and multi-modal language learning processes (speaking, writing, listening, reading) that tiny infants are capable of using from birth.

Multiple Language Learning

This is paired alongside with exposure to items and events: the natural world of faces, actions, voices, etc. When your child is exposed to multiple language learning directly results higher behavior regulation (raising their hand instead of shouting out, taking turns, waiting in line, etc.) when they begin school. Multiple language learning is directly related to improving a child’s ability to learn to read. Learn my best kept secrets for how I taught my daughter 8 languages in 6 years HERE.

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