Read words - A Toddler Activity
I tried to automate learning to read using the Phonetic method. In this article, I tell about my journey into world of phonics, twin words, and magic Es.
Check it out:
The Activity
First, why? As you probably know from my previous post on what do you hear, I'm trying to take a creative approach to teaching my Daughter to do things like listen, recognize letters, numbers, words, and more, and I have been relying on building games to help.
We're now learning to read with the Phonetic method, so of course I thought I'd build a game to help.
How it works
Phonics works by teaching the reader to recognize the sounds of the letters in a word, and then put those sounds together to form the word.
Simple phonetic alphabet
For example, the word "cat" is made up of the letters "c", "a", and "t". The:
"c"makes the sound"k","a"makes the sound"ah",- and
"t"makes the sound"t".
So, when you put those sounds together, you say "k-ah-t" to get the word "cat".
Using letters to represent sounds kinda sucks, so here's the phonetic alphabet with the actual sounds:
Special phonetic characters for vowels
Some words are not so simple however, so we can't simply chain the phonetic representation of the letters together to get the word, such as "home", "tree", "five", where because of the ending (or magic) "e", we have to use the actual alphabet sound of the letters "o" in "home", "e" in "tree", and "i" in "five".
To get the software to recognize such words, I find it useful to add special characters for each vowel to signify that it should be read as its actual alphabet sound instead of its phonetic sound.
For example,
- The long
"a"sound is represented as"ā" - The long
"e"sound is represented as"ē" - The long
"i"sound is represented as"ī" - The long
"o"sound is represented as"ō" - The long
"u"sound is represented as"ū"
Here are the special vowel phonetic characters:
Special phonetic characters for consonants
And then of course, there are the special characters for the consonants which can combine to form a different sound such as sh and ch which are represented as "š" and "č" respectively.
Here are the special consonant phonetic characters:
Putting it all together
Let's take a few examples:
"cat"is"cat""home"is"hōmm""tree"is"trēē"or"trii""five"is"fīvv"
Notice the repeated characters in the phonetic representations of "hōmm", "trēē", and "fīvv". This is because duplicate similar sounds are pronounced together. In my code, I like to call them twin sounds. It is the job of the code to recognize them and join them together. e.g.
cat (Simple)
Click on each letter to hear the sound.
hōmm (Magic E, Twin Sounds)
Note the twin sounds are highlighted, indicating that they should be pronounced together.
trēē (Magic E, Twin Sounds)
fīvv (Twin Sounds)
And so on.
By combining these three rules, we can read many words. Of course, there are many more rules to learn, because English is a complex language e.g.
"yawn"is"yoon""boat"is"bōōt""nightmare"is"nīīītmerr"
yawn
boat
nightmare
Make your own words
With these rules, You can make your own words by entering the word and its pronunciation below. Let me know how it goes for you in the comments, haha!
The Game
Are you interested in the activity for someone who is learning to read? You can check out all similar activities here:
