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 working with struggling readers who require additional help in reading fundamentals and comprehension skills development.
The Sounds of Speech
Click below to watch a short video clip featuring Dr. Louisa Moats and kindergarten teacher Virginia Campbell demonstrating how modeling sounds can help children distinguish between letters.
To understand a spoken language, a child must be able to hear and distinguish the sounds that make up the language.
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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Activities to Encourage Speech and Language Development
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association offers these age-appropriate ways that parents can engage their young children in ways that will help children develop speech and language abilities.
Hearing the difference between similar sounding words such as grow and glow is easy for most children, but not for all children.
The following are four short video clips that offer you the chance to watch and learn effective speech sound activities. The video clips are from Reading Rockets' PBS television series Launching Young Readers.
Speech Sounds: Suggested Activities
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.
Young Children's Oral Language Development
The development of oral language is one of the child's most natural – and impressive – accomplishments.
§ To play this clip, you'll need a copy of the free RealOne Player. Most computers already have it installed, or you can download it now.
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Reading Rockets is a national multimedia project that offers research-based and best-practice information on teaching kids to read and helping those who struggle. It is an educational service of public television station WETA in Washington, D.C.
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