At the weekend I was asked to have a look at a child with literacy difficulties. One of the problems she had was that she hadn’t been taught to say sounds precisely.
Sounds-Write sets great store in emphasising to teachers the importance of saying sounds properly without adding an /uh / sound after every consonant.
Why? Because if sounds are said precisely, it is much easier to hear what a word is. For example, if you say the sounds in ‘mat’ as /m / /a / /t /, it is very easy to hear the word ‘mat’. On the other hand, if every consonant sound has an added /uh / sound after it, it is very difficult to hear what the word is.
This becomes more important as words get longer.
If you’d like some very helpful and amusing examples of how to say sounds correctly and how NOT to say sounds, you need look no further than the children of St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Primary School in Bletchley.
Here are a couple of examples:
And you can see them all here.