How To Supporting the Primary Child’s Language Development

By Sara Berge, All Day Primary Teacher

            In an effort to illuminate how we offer the skills necessary for writing and reading to the primary-aged child, here are three ways you can mirror what we do at home to support their growth.

1.    Try not to call the letters by their names.

            What a bizarre request, right? It sounds crazy; don’t worry, it did initially to us as well, but the reason for doing so is very logical. Knowing the name of a letter will not help your child write (which they will conquer before they read), or synthesize the sounds in a word in order to read it.

            If not by their names, then how should you identify them? By their phonetic sounds. Letters are arbitrary symbols, agreed upon by people, thereby allowing us to arrange them in ways also arbitrarily assigned meaning, so that we can communicate. English is one of the hardest languages to learn due to the multitude of sounds each letter can make. But initially, we identify these symbols by their phonetic sounds for the young child. While most children come to the Montessori environment knowing the name of each letter, we refer to letters by their names. For example, A is “ahh,” as it sounds in the beginning of apple, and B is “buh,” not “bee,” etc. It takes practice to do this. When the language portion of the curriculum was reached in Montessori teacher training, I spent at least a week practicing these sounds out loud and breaking down the letters of everything I put in my grocery cart. I’m sure the folks I was sharing an aisle with were confused at best. All of this is to say that it takes a lot of effort to get out of our adult brains and disassociate such ingrained concepts.

            Knowing the name is sometimes confusing for children when they reach the writing stage. What I find myself saying is, “yes, the name of the letter is C (‘see’), but the sound it makes is ‘kuh.” This is a good activity to do if you find yourself reading an alphabet book to your child, or playing with an alphabet puzzle for example.
            Here’s a list of the phonetic sounds:

A- short A, as in apple (not ate)	N- nnn
B- buh	O- short O, as in ostrich, olive, octopus (not orange, or hope)
C- kuh, as in cat (not circle)	P- puh
D- duh	Q- qu, as in queen (can’t separate q & u sound)
E- short E, as in elephant (not eager)	R- ruh, as in red (not “er,” as in tiger”)
F- fff, made with teeth pressing into lower lip	S- sss
G- guh, as in globe (not giraffe)	T- tuh
H- huh	U- short U, as in under or umbrella (not unicorn)
I- short I made with nose scrunched up, as in itchy	V- vuh
J- juh	W- wuh
K- kuh	X- kuh-ss, as in fox (not xylophone)
L- luh	Y- yuh, as in yogurt (not happy)
M- mmm, as in “mm, mmm, good!”	Z- zzz, as in buzz

2.    Play the sound game.

            Besides learning the phonetic sounds, which we teach with a material called the Sandpaper Letters, the other skill your child masters before moving onto writing is the ability to analyze all of the sounds in a word. Since words are made up of sounds, in order to write a word, you must be able to hear all of the sounds in it. To practice this skill, we play “the sound game.” I might open a treasure trove of tiny objects, which are very enticing to the young child, pick one out, place it on the table, and say “heart, huh-huh-huh-heart, heart begins with huh.” I would continue until I have three objects on the table, then reiterate the beginning sound of each. Next I ask the child to point to the object that begins with “huh,” and so on, covering all three. You can also phrase this part as an “eye spy” game (“I spy, with my little eye, an object that begins with ‘tuh;’ do you see it?”).

            Eventually we play this game with the ending sounds (“cheetah, cheetah-uh-uh-uh, cheetah ends with uh”), then middle sounds, then all sounds in a word. Analyzing all sounds would look something like this: “dog, duh-aww-guh, duh-aww-guh, dog.”

            The trickiest part of this game is dissociating the sounds in a word from the letters that comprise it. When we play the sounds game we’re not thinking about the letters at all. The reason we don’t want to draw the child’s attention to the letters is a principle that runs throughout the Montessori philosophy: isolation of difficulty. Learning the phonetic sounds, and learning to analyze the sounds in a word are two distinct skills. Both are necessary to writing, and eventually reading, but we don’t merge them until they’re been independently mastered.

            Since this is a completely verbal game, you don’t need objects to play, although the concreteness makes for an easy starting point and grounds the child in the activity. After some practice you can do this with words off the top of your head. You might play this game while you’re driving in the car, or eating dinner. You can also branch out into categories, such as vegetables. You might say, “I’m thinking of a vegetable that begins with a ‘puh;’ can you guess it?…Potato, yes, can you think of any more vegetables that begin with ‘puh?’”

           

3.    Don’t get caught up on spelling.

            Easier said than done, yes. When your child first begins to write they will only know the single phonetic sound associated with each letter. They’ve yet to learn that ‘sss’ and ‘huh’ together make ‘shhhhh,’ but they will and it’s going to take sometime. Our initial concern is that they experience writing as a joyful process of self-expression. Since their minds are ready before their hands are (we have a separate material designed to ready their hand for writing with a pencil), your child first writes with the Moveable Alphabet. This material is made up of one to two inch wooden cutouts of each letter, in cursive, that the child arranges into words on a lined rug.

            Initially, to ensure an early success that will encourage them to continue, we feed them words with a one-to-one phonetic correspondence like cat, nest, and map. However, our goal is wean them from this dependence as quickly as possible and set them loose to write to their heart’s content. Little by little we introduce the more complex rules of phonics, often as they ask how to make ‘shh’ because they’re stumped by a word they want to write, for example. Other times they find their own creative solutions, which we never discourage. Spelling in English is not logical or intuitive, and many words must simply be memorized. The essence that we want to maintain is how excited they are about expressing themselves in writing. To overemphasize spelling from the beginning will likely remove any joy or excitement from the process and discourage the child all together. We would rather let the confidence in their skills, which they’ve spent a lot of time honing, and their will to express themselves carry them forward. Spelling will come later.

If you use any of these strategies at home, one key is to always keep things playful. If your child starts to feel stressed through the process, they will start to shut down, and it can make the work at school more challenging.