Teaching Kids How to Sound Out Words

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to teach how to sound out. This is the most basic skill, this will come back over and over and over for the next two, three years maybe so make sure you go slowly and clearly and don't worry about repeating as many times as possible until your child catches on. Start with consonant, vowel, consonant is usually basic so we'll take the most basic word of all, cat. Now what we do is, first we cover up everything but the c and your child is learning their letter sounds sohe or she says kk, have them say it clearly and loudly and then the vowel gets stretched, kkk, aaa, kkk, aaa, don't let them do anything else yet, just kkk, aaaa, kkk, aaa, and then finally add the ending, kkk, aaa, tuh, and then you ask them, what is that word and they say cat. Now you can do this to show them for the first few but eventually very quickly you want them to do all the work themselves and they should learn to cover with their finger, of course not the way I am but they'll cover with their finger, everything but the first letter and sound it out. We'll do another one. And at this time I also like to switch up the vowels a lot and the consonants, I don't like to do all a's or all e's. So this one, have them cover up all but the first letter, go ahead, tell your child sound that out, ppp, iii, good, make sure they get that iii clearly, they don't make it sound eh or anything else and now put it together, pp, ii, nnn. What I tell them is in the beginning is we stretch it out but after we get to know it we compress it, we squeeze it together, p i n, pin, pin. And then we just say it, one syllable, pin, and what is that word? Pin. And make sure they know that this, in the very beginning they might say pin, like you fry on the frying pin, that tells you they don't quite know what the vowel is yet, make sure it's ii and not aa or anything else. So until they tell you pin, oh, like you stick a pin in a pin cushion, that's when you know it. And do that very carefully. It might seem like you're dragging it on. Don't worry, go slowly, go carefully, do it over and over. This is the most important foundation in learning to read and write."