As you can probably tell from his name, Mr. Sounders enjoys the sounds and phonetics of the English language. While Miss A and Coach Z help your children recognize what letters look like and how they look when combined to make words, Mr. Sounders helps them sound those letters out and develop a deeper understanding of the Code.
What is the Code? It refers to the system that actively involves children in learning how to sound out our alphabet:
- Letter-Sound Correspondence
- Blending and Segmenting
- Decoding and Encoding
- Spelling and Orthographic Recognition
Mr. Sounders starts with recognizing rhymes, and aims to have children creating their own rhymes in no time. Next, he’ll have them counting, blending, and segmenting syllables to understand how words are broken down. Count-ing-syl-la-bles-can-be-real-ly-fun!
From there, the class works on onset and rime. As a refresher, onset is a consonant sound before the vowel, like /m/ in mat; rime is a vowel and all other sounds that follow, like /at/ in mat. The children learn to blend and segment onset and rime to say the whole word and then the parts of the word.
Finally comes the phoneme, building children’s ability to identify and manipulate individual speech sounds in oral language.
Hearing the sounds of letters, words, and sentences is the key to becoming a successful reader and ultimately a successful communicator. While Mr. Sounders’ lessons are only a part of the whole iRead equation, they certainly are the loudest and can often be the most fun part of learning how to read!
Explore all of Beastie Hall’s classrooms, and watch this space to meet more foundational skills experts in the coming weeks.
