Suppose you were teaching a kindergartener his numbers. You would start by explaining that “1” means one of anything: one shoe, one horse, one star. The student would get it.
But what if later you explaine that sometimes “1” doesn’t mean one. Sometimes “1” means “two.” Huh?
And weeks later, you explain that sometimes “1” doesn’t mean on”1” or “2” but “3”! What?
How is the poor kid expected to learn math?
Yet that is exactly what happens when we teach sounds associated with letters. We teach that “a” represents the sound in “apple” and “cat.”
But later, we explain that sometimes “a” doesn’t represent the sound in “apple” and “cat.” It represents the sound in “Abe” and “cake.”
And later, we explain that sometimes “a” doesn’t mean the sounds in “apple” and “Abe” but represents the sounds in “ball” and “awful.”
And weeks later, we explain that sometimes “a” also means the sound in “aha.”
Aah!
In English, some consonant sounds have a one-on-one relationship with a letter. The letter “b,” for example, always sounds the same. Young children can easily learn a one-to-one relationship.
But some consonants have double sounds, such as “c” and “g,” whose sound depends on the letter that follows. Now the child needs to learn not a one-to-one relationship, but a one-to-two relationship. And some consonants, like the letter “t,” have a one-to-three relationship (“top,” “the,” thin”).
To little kids, a one-to-one logic makes sense. “I’ll give you my lollipop if you give me your balloon.” But one-to-two or one-to-three or one-to-seven logic confound children.
That is one of the reasons why learning to read in English is so hard.
comicphonics for early readers 