By midway through kindergarten, the benchmark expectation is that children should be able to read some words that have a consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern, like "s-a-t". However, this does not mean that children are necessarily expected to know all the letter sounds just yet. In fact, children can be taught how to blend letter sounds into words with only a handful of learned letters!
Many schools teach a set of letter sounds that are more common than other letters and can be combined in a variety of ways to spell real words. This is known as teaching “SATPIN”, which simply means teaching children the sounds of the 6 common letters: S, A, T, P, I, and N. These six letters can be combined to make many two-sound words, such as ‘at, in, an, and it’, and can then be used to create a variety of CVC words like ‘sat, tin, nap, tip’, and so on.
But isn’t it important for kindergarteners to learn all the letter sounds? Is this method putting the cart before the horse? Most literacy experts agree that it is ok for young learners to be taught how to read short words alongside learning the rest of the letter sounds. Learning letter-sound correspondences and blending sounds together are two different, but closely related, cognitive tasks. Learning to associate a sound with the symbol of a letter creates permanent connections in the brain specific to that symbol, while learning to blend those sounds together to make a word is about the ability to hear, isolate, and manipulate the smallest units of speech sound (phonemes).
Both tasks are part of building phonemic awareness, but working on one does not impede the development of the other. In fact, the joy children experience with early success when they sound out their first words motivates them to learn more letter sounds! And sounding out words helps children understand the concept of letters as symbols of sound, which is actually a very advanced and abstract concept that we are asking these little ones to grasp!
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