So you can see that by teaching your toddler the letter sounds in the simplest and purest form, it helps them to combine the sounds together into words later on. They’ll start with 2 letter words and build up. This is how they sound out their first words. Blend the letter sounds (for older children)Īfter your child is very familiar with most of the letter sounds, they can start to combine these sounds together. Maybe you can both spot some things around the room that start with the letter sound you’re exploring. ‘c’ is also for ‘cat’ and ‘can’ and ‘caterpillar’. Ask your toddler if they can think of other words starting with that letter. Name the word that the letter begins with. M – should be ‘mmmm’ rather than ‘muh’ Name words that the letter starts withįlashcards like the ones listed below can really help with this. T – should be a short ‘t t t’ rather than ‘tuh’ So for consonants try to keep the sound as simple and as pure to the letter sound as possible. When they go to blend letters into words later on it can sometimes be confusing. This is because you are giving 1 letter, 2 sounds: one for ‘s’ and the other for ‘uh’. However, recent studies have found that the addition of ‘uh’ onto the end of the letter sound may not help in the long term. For example we would say ‘s’ is ‘suh’ or ‘c’ is ‘cuh’. Our instinct is to say consonant sounds with a vowel. For vowels this is quite simple as it’s a loud sound:įor consonants it can be trickier as they are quiet sounds. Take each letter and show your toddler the sound it makes when it’s being read. These are different from the names of those letters, A, E, O which are pronounced Ai, Ee, Oh. For example for ‘a, e, o’ the sounds are ‘ah, eh, oh’. Phonics is all about teaching your toddler the SOUNDS that letters make. How do you teach phonics sounds? Sound it out Begin to match spoken words with written ones.Identify rhymes and making up their own rhyming words.Blend sounds together and read first words.Recognize letters and letter-sound matches.

Understand that print is read left-to-right and top-to-bottom.Identify some letter shapes and make some letter-sound matches.Is able to talk about the stories in the books they listen to.Have some favourite books that they request.Engage with books by touching them or turning pages.Is able to recognise and imitate certain sounds.Early Reading Milestones Baby’s First Year (0-1 years)

Talking alphabet alphabet phonics