Should we teach letter names and sounds separately or together?

 

Teaching kids to read might not be easy and can be quite challenging. However, knowing the right techniques to teaching kids reading might save all the troubles and provide a good teaching experience for teachers or parents as well as provide good learning experience for the kids. The very first step to reading is for the kids to know and remember the letter sounds. Once they have this first step down, the next step would be to be able to blend or put the sounds together to form words. Words are made up of sounds. Thus it is very important that the kids know and remember all the sounds. The letter would be the symbol. Each letter represents sound or sounds.

Letter names and sounds can be taught together or separately. Your approach to teaching reading should depend on the students’ level. When teaching reading to a group of weak students, it is highly recommended for teachers or parents to teach the letter names and sounds separately. It is very important to hold on to the ‘keep it short and sweet’ when dealing with the weak students. Remember to break the teaching into parts and we have to take one small step at a time. Do not teach a lot of things and concepts in one lesson. Teaching letter names and sounds together to a group of weak students could be too much of information to them. It is going to be a lot for them to take in and to process. The last thing we want to do is to put our kids in such situation. Our goal should be to show them that English is fun and easy to keep them motivated and excited learning the second language.