Letters & Sounds
KindergartenEvery word is built from letters, and every letter has a sound. Once you can hear the sounds hiding inside a word, you can read it — and once you can read it, a whole world of stories opens up.
Letters have names and sounds
The alphabet has 26 letters. Each letter has a name (what we call it) and a sound (what it says in a word). The letter B is named "bee," but in the word bat it says /b/, like a quiet pop.
Vowels and consonants
Five letters are special vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Every single word needs at least one. All the other letters are consonants. Think of consonants as the walls of a word and vowels as the open doorways that let the sound flow through.
Blending: gluing sounds together
Reading is blending — pushing sounds together smoothly instead of saying them one at a time. /c/ /a/ /t/ said slowly, then squeezed together, becomes cat.
Think of each letter as a musical note. On its own, a note is just a sound — but play a few notes one after another, smoothly, and you get a tune. Words work the same way: letters are notes, and reading is playing them in order without a gap between them.
This is why we practise saying sounds slowly first — /s/ ... /u/ ... /n/ — and then faster and faster until they melt into one word: sun. The slow version and the fast version are the same word; only the speed changes.
Say /m/ and feel your lips press shut. Say /s/ and feel air hiss through your teeth. Say /a/ and feel your mouth open wide. Every sound feels different in your mouth — that feeling helps you remember it.
Activity: sound hunt
Grab a grown-up or a stuffed animal to help. Say each word out loud, slowly, stretching every sound like chewing gum before blending it back together.
s - u - n → sun
m - a - p → map
How to do it: point to each letter as you say its sound, then slide your finger under the whole word and say it fast. Do this for five words on a cereal box, a book cover, or a sign in your kitchen.
Now you try: stretch out the sounds in pig and top and then blend them. (Answer: p-i-g → pig, t-o-p → top.)
Why do some letters have more than one sound?
AEnglish borrowed words from many countries, so some letters picked up extra jobs. The letter C says /k/ in cat but /s/ in city. There is no shortcut for this — you learn the common patterns by reading lots of words and noticing what sound "wins" in each one.
What is the difference between a letter's name and its sound?
AThe name is what you say when you recite the alphabet ("ay, bee, see…"). The sound is what the letter contributes inside a word. Say the name "double-u" and you hear nothing like the sound in "win" — that's why we practise sounds, not just names, for reading.
Why are a, e, i, o, u so important?
AVowels carry the "open" part of every syllable — try saying any word without one, like str or ct, and you'll find it's not a real word yet. Every syllable in English needs a vowel sound to give it a voice.