Hearing Every Sound: Phonemic Awareness

February 19, 2023

Hearing Every Sound: Phonemic Awareness

I think most of us give very little thought to the importance of hearing every sound when teaching our children to read. I know that I did. It wasn’t something that I was taught when taking my teaching classes while in a credentialing program. Reading was always easy for me, and when I started my career in teaching, most reading programs didn’t focus on its necessity.


Phonics was being used primarily at the time, but it wasn’t long before Whole Language took over the reading scene, and phonics was dumped in many schools. While phonics helped a child hear the sounds and then put them together to form words, whole language focused more on reading for the meaning of the text in a way that related to the student’s own life and culture. When writing, the use of “best guess spelling” was used to keep the ideas flowing.


Unfortunately, the Whole Language approach did not work for dyslexic students at all. They could look at a picture and tell you their own story, but they couldn’t read the words on the page.


I had a parent come to me to screen her daughter for dyslexia, because her child’s school had told her that her daughter didn’t have any learning disabilities. She could “tell” the educator about the story by giving her own interpretation while looking at the pictures. Of course, this same child couldn’t read any of the words on the page. While this is extreme, it shows how many children are “left behind” when they can’t memorize enough words to make up for not being able to sound out the words.


Whole Language can be useful for a “Quick Write” when you don’t want the student to be bogged down by looking up every word they can’t spell, and I’m all for this; however, I would consider this a rough draft. They would need to go back and fix the spelling, so the story could be easily read. So basically, whole language is useful to encourage creativity, but phonics is needed to be able to spell and read what is written.


If your child is dyslexic, not just any phonics program will work. It should be Orton-Gillingham based. This type of program requires a student to learn to separate out sounds. A child who is not dyslexic can probably learn to read with any reading program, but just about any child, dyslexic or not, can learn to read with an Orton-Gillingham based program. There are several of these programs, but they are expensive and do require quite a bit of training depending on which program is chosen.


To teach your child to read at home, the first thing you need to do is help them hear every sound. There are simple exercises to do this. Having your child listen to three sounds and determining which are the same and which are different is a good start. I’ve compiled practice exercises that are easy to use and available to purchase on an inexpensive pdf download. When you are confident that your child is hearing each sound, it will be time to teach each sound of the alphabet correctly. They will then be able to start putting sounds together to form simple words.


Remember, there is no substitute for hearing every sound when beginning to learn to read. It’s the foundation to becoming a good reader that makes every academic subject more interesting, more fun, and just plain easier to understand.


Small Bites “Hearing Every Sound” is available through my website, betty-goodman.com. It’s never too soon, nor too late to get started.

Ten Things to Help Your Child Be Prepared to Learn

August 6, 2025
Do you remember the beginning of each school year when you were young? I do! I loved school, or at least elementary and junior high. High school was not as much fun because of all of the drama probably due to raging hormones. During the summers, as kids, we would play school. Actually, it was a good thing. It helped us remember our math skills, and kept us reading throughout the summer. I’m of the age that home computers did not exist yet, and you were lucky if you had a wall phone without a party-line (when you share your phone line with someone else because there weren’t enough lines to go around). Obviously, we didn’t have cell phones to distract us. We played some of the standard games of that time period like Monopoly and Scrabble, but mostly we made up our own games to play outside. But today is much different. Hopefully our children are still excited about a new school year, but our children today face challenges that did not exist when I was in school. We have technology in most classrooms that can either be a huge blessing or for some a curse. But regardless of how our classrooms are structured, either at school or at home (for homeschool families), one thing remains the same, our children are there to learn. We, as the adults in the room, need to bring structure and the cohesiveness needed for the best learning outcomes. So, here are 10 things that parents can do to help their children be prepared to learn? Make sure they have enough school clothes that fit so that they are not self-conscious about how they look. If you can only afford one week’s worth of clothes that’s okay. Laundry can be done on the weekend, and the order in which they wear their clothes or the way they pair shirts and pants can change for new combinations. Get the most important school supplies ahead of time and have them in their backpack. Other supplies can be purchased as needed. (In many places the two or three weeks before school starts, all school supplies are really cheap comparatively, so if you can afford it, it’s nice to stock up on what you know will be needed.) Have a plan for an easy, healthy, high-protein, low-sugar breakfast they can eat each morning. If they take lunch, it’s helpful to fix it the night before and put it in the refrigerator to eliminate a lot of morning stress. Make sure homework or anything else that needs to go to school the next day is in the backpack the night before. Arrive at school a little early, so they won’t feel embarrassed by walking in late. You want them to get off to a good calm start every day. In the evenings, talk about what your child learned that day. Ask appropriate questions about each subject. If they need help, it’s okay to help them. Children learn in all different ways. Sometimes they may need some input from you to be able to do the assignment. If you feel they are struggling in school in general, schedule an appointment to meet with the teacher right away. If it’s just one subject that’s hard for them, I would personally schedule an appointment to meet with the teacher. Most teachers want to know if there is a struggle, so they can meet that individual need. Be aware of what your child is learning in school. If you have questions, ask the teacher, but don’t be a “helicopter” parent. The best place to do homework for a younger child is the dining room table. It helps them stay on track, and it lets you know what they should be learning. Actually, in my home we all did homework at the dining room table all the way through high school. It eliminates isolation and provides immediate help when needed. Happy New School Year!
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