Reading Rockets offers a wealth of reading strategies, lessons, and activities designed to help young children learn how to read and read better. Our reading resources assist parents, teachers, and other educators in helping struggling readers build fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills.
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Reading 101

The Sounds of Speech

To understand a spoken language, a child must be able to hear and distinguish the sounds that make up the language.

Watch Dr. Louisa Moats and kindergarten teacher Virginia Campbell demonstrate how modeling sounds can help children distinguish between letters.

Virtually every child raised in a normal linguistic environment can distinguish between different speech sounds in his or her native language. Almost all native English speakers can therefore hear the difference between similar English words like grow and glow.

Children who are not able to hear the difference between similar-sounding words like grow and glow will be confused when these words appear in context, and their comprehension skills will suffer dramatically.

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Every child is unique and has an individual rate of development. This chart represents, on average, the age by which most children will accomplish skills in hearing, understanding, and talking.

Hearing the difference between similar sounding words such as grow and glow is easy for most children, but not for all children. Children who unable to hear these differences will be confused when these words appear in context, and their comprehension skills will suffer dramatically.

These four short video clips give you the chance to watch and learn effective speech sound activities. The video clips are from Reading Rockets' PBS television series Launching Young Readers. video

Children must understand how speech sounds work to be ready for instruction in reading and writing. There are many activities that you can do with your students to help them increase their knowledge of speech sounds and their relationship to letters.

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