Beginning the alphabet and reading -- long long how-to

What to do if you have a child who is just not getting the alphabet – who has gotten to eight or even twelve years old and still doesn’t recognize all the letters?
Yes, it is possible to teach the alphabet even at twelve or even to an adult. It’s never too late to learn.

In fact, the technique described here is *also* good for four- to six-year-olds with their first introduction to the alphabet – get it right the first time! Seriously, why wait three years and then see if the child is confusing and reversing letters and writing upside down and backwards? If you take a tiny amount of time, twenty minutes a day for a year now, you may be able to avoid years of extra work, frustration, and unteaching down the road.

First, we are assuming that this student has adequate intelligence and some linguistic skills. If the student is non-verbal, this is going to be a lot harder, and if the student is unresponsive to spoken language it is not going to be possible to teach linguistically; in these extreme cases you will need a specialist to work with that student’s disability.
And the student needs to be functioning mentally on an adequate level to understand the pictures and symbols, in general at least a four-year-old level.
Also, the student’s vision and hearing need to be adequate. Certainly if a child is not learning a standard vision and hearing screening should be done. If at all possible get this done by a doctor, not just the assembly-line school screening where there may not be enough time or expertise to pick up subtle clues to problems.
Given adequate mental and physical functioning and verbal skills, this approach works.

Then if the child is still not learning up to mental ability, if at all possible get screened by responsible professionals for CAPD and developmental vision, and get therapy from providers with a proven track record.

It is still possible to teach reading to most people with these sensory problems, and in fact many of the techniques that I recommend here are therapeutic in their own right; but people who have experienced this with their own children say that helping the underlying sensory problems makes reading a lot easier.

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To start into the teaching sessions, our goal is NOT to teach the whole alphabet. That is far too big a chunk to swallow all at once: 26 letters, 52 print forms, a total of 104 forms if you include cursive, 44 or 45 sounds represented by those forms – all too much! Imagine if you wanted to learn Russian or Greek or Korean and were presented with a totally strange alphabet, and the teacher ran through the whole thing and expected you to remember all fifty forms. It doesn’t matter how many times you repeat all fifty things, if you keep presenting them all at once the student will stay muddled. In fact he is likely to get the info mixed and learn something quite wrong, and then you will have to try to change his mind and unteach, not good. We’ll get to the whole alphabet, never fear we’ll get there, and in the long run we often get there faster than the people who keep presenting masses of data! Just that we will *focus* our goals more and do one thing at a time until we can put it all together later.

We start by teaching one letter. Just one. You need vowels of course, so you might as well start with a. It is easy to say alone (*short* aaa as in apple), it is a word in its own right, and it is the beginning of the alphabet. Some people start with i. (short iiii as in indian, ink, igloo) and that is just fine too, although the short i. is somewhat hard to say in isolation – doesn’t occur in normal speech. But you’re going to have to get to it sooner or later and it works fine. The i. is sometimes preferred to a because it makes up more sentence-forming words, no big deal either way.

[A note on the side about pronunciation of the word “a”: NO normal English speaker says “I see ay dog.” No, in normal speech you use the *short* aaaa sound. Some people think they have a cute quick trick teaching the child to say the name of the letter, the long ay sound, wow, you save a whole couple of minutes not teaching the short sound, and then for many years and often the rest of their lives the students sound weird whenever they read out loud – anything that saves a couple of minutes and wastes years is NOT efficient! Most quick tricks and shortcuts are dead ends. Also “the” is usually pronounced with the muttered or schwa vowel; it is pronounced “thee” ONLY before a word starting with a stressed vowel, same as a versus an and kids can learn that distinction so they can learn “the” as well. Please teach normal – clear and distinct but normal – pronunciation. The news announcers on national TV are mostly good examples of good clear General American speech, with all the consonants in there, and that is a good goal to aim for.]

Once you have decided the letter you are going to do, you start making a binder. Some people make individual cards but I have found the large pages are convenient and the binder keeps everything together much better than a stack of cards; also for the older student it looks much more grown-up.

You get light cardboard (Bristol board) the size of a usual page, 8 ½ by 11 or 9 x 12. You can buy it in those sizes, or buy sheets at the dollar store and measure and cut them. It is very much the best idea to make all the sheets the same colour – you want the student to attend to the material *on* the page, and not the background colour. (Be warned – the intelligent student will find all sorts of wrong clues everywhere, so avoid giving them.) Any light colour will do, just avoid neons which are distracting. Use a three-hole punch and reinforcing gummy circles to make the sheet go in the binder and stay there over multiple uses. Now, you may be saying this is an awful lot of work, doing this for 26 letters (and ten digits). Well it does add up, but we are NOT doing it all at once! You make up one page at a time, two or three a week – more on that later – and you do the work *with* the student beside you, helping where he can (gluing on the little reinforcers, maybe cutting and punching if he is coordinated.)

You get scrap corduroy or velvet or velveteen – some nice soft but distinct texture — either from your sewing box or a worn-out piece of clothing or by buying a quarter yard remnant at the sewing store (you don’t need much and a quarter yard will be plenty.) Again, it is best if ALL the pages have the same colour and texture. You can use blue for consonants and red for vowels if you want, y twice one of each, but that is it – multicolours will give false clues.
Montessori uses sandpaper and other teachers suggest other textures, but the soft velvet texture is both definitely clear and inviting to the touch. I have had some kids with sensory issues balk at rough textures, and why not make things inviting if you can.

You take a ruler and a coloured pencil, contrasting for example yellow on blue, and working on the *right* side (soft side) of the textured fabric – right side or else your letters will be reversed – you trace both sides of the ruler, drop the ruler down again below the bottom line and trace again to make the standard triple guideline for printing. (Letters with tails like g, j, y will be too high on the cloth but you fix that on the cardboard.) Exact size of the letters is not important, just two ruler widths which will give you between two and three inches (5 – 8 cm) total height. If you are using a fairly stiff corduroy this will work pretty easily; if you have velveteen and it slithers all over, thumbtack the edges to a piece of plywood or plasterboard to give shape and backing while you draw. If your student has serious visual or coordination problems, make a larger guide to replace the ruler, two inches high so the total height will be four inches.

You draw outlines of the LOWER-CASE letters on the cloth, making them nice and bulky and fat, the cloth forming each letter at least ¼ inch (6mm) wide and if possible a bit more. Then you cut them out with either very sharp scissors or a craft knife. All letters are *one piece* except the dots on i. and j.
If you really mistrust your own skills, you can print the alphabet very large – 288 point is two inches high – on a computer; if your computer stops at 144, enlarge with photocopier 200%; and then trace those letters onto the cloth using carbon paper (office supply store or sewing store – the sewing stuff is designed to fade after a few days so do all your cutting right away) Be extremely careful what font you use – it must be as much like hand printing as possible. Special particular problems are the letters a and g, which you want to be the simple “ball” forms, *not* the printed squiggly forms – if your font is otherwise good, you can stick together o and i. to make a, and o and j to make g.
Don’t try to use kids’ school scissors – you’ll ruin your hands; buy or borrow real sewing scissors (and if you borrow them, for Heaven’s sake use *only* on cloth, because if you ruin the edge you have damaged a friendship too.)

Now, this is fine finicking work and you may spend five minutes or more on one letter. That’s fine! Remember, we are doing ONE letter at a time, not the whole shebang. You can draw out several on one line and then cut one at a time as you teach them.
Meanwhile, your student is beside you. You explain what you are doing, let him watch, let him help where he can, maybe drawing lines with the ruler (be extremely cautious with sharp scissors and craft knives, please, until you *know* the student has the skill!)

Issue – why do I keep stressing lower-case? Well, to avoid overload, you have to start with one *or* the other – we’ll get to the other, be patient and we’ll get there plenty soon. Now look at this page. How many lower-case and how many capitals? Look at any good children’s book – same thing. Writing is generally 95% or more lower-case. If you can read lower-case, you can read almost anything, but if you can read only all capitals the only thing you can read is street signs. There is a myth around that capitals are in some way “easier”. This is a myth. In fact psychological tests have shown that in the limit of distance or blurring, lower-case writing is more distinguishable. There is also a myth that capitals are “easier” to write because they are mostly straight lines. Again this is a myth. Look at a child’s drawing and scribbling – for almost all children, curves predominate; straight lines have to be learned painfully in school. Of course, if the child has had capitals presented on TV and in books for several years, he may know them better and think they are easier – anything you already know is the easier way – but lower-case has to be learned, ***and this confusion, knowing capitals but having to read lower-case, may indeed be part of the difficulty with older students not catching on.***

OK, now you have a sheet of Bristol board in your binder and a cutout letter. You start a little below the top of the page and with your ruler and coloured pencil or marker you draw your three standard guidelines one ruler width apart again, top, middle, and bottom. It’s a nice touch to draw them in blue and dot the middle line like the usual printing practice book – helps transfer learning later. You use a glue stick and glue your cloth letter in proper position in the middle of the line. Note that “tail” letters g, j, p, q, y have the top of the letter on the middle line and the “tail” hangs down *below* the bottom line.

Using a permanent marker, mark beside or on the letter (if on, test on scrap cloth first to make sure it doesn’t run) a dot for the place to start forming it, and arrows for directions. Use a good printing guide if you are not positive what are standard directions. Rules are (1) left to right, always (2) top to bottom (3) entry circles (a, c, d, e, g, o, q) are counterclockwise – down the left and finish up the right. Important side note, d is circle counterclockwise first, while b is stick then clockwise ball – teach this and avoid b-d reversals, similarly p-q. Make sure s, i., l, t, etc are top-to-bottom; the reverse may *appear* easier to a beginner but it is a real fight to unlearn when he is spellling backwards and crying over cursive, so start right and avoid the traps. Most letters are formed smoothly cursive-like without lifting the pen (the ball and stick with multiple pen lifts was never carried on past Grade 2 anyway, so why not start out with what you intend to finish with). The only letters that require a pen lift and second stroke are f, dots on i., j; k, t, and x (both strokes downwards please). I use a single dot for the start of the first line, and two smaller dots for the start of the second if any. When drawing your little direction arrows, mark the dots on i. and j with a circular motion (not a good habit to stab the paper hard to make the dot).

OK, now that was too much info. You may be thinking you can never remember all that and keep it straight. Don’t worry! You do ONE letter at a time. If you are starting with a, you remember that it is formed by starting a little under the middle line, counter-clockwise circle down the left and up the right, up a bit to the middle line, and back down the stick. Done. Do a, and when you get it done and taught, look at your printing guide for the next letter form.

Now you want to illustrate the sounds (plural, often more than one) that go with each letter. If you can draw recognizably, you can cartoon the key words and colour them in. If not, you can use computer clip art or cutouts from magazines. Your student can help you find magazine pictures or clip art, colour in your sketches or clip art if he is fairly neat at colouring, suggest colours for you to use – whatever will help keep him involved in the process. This is a project you are building together. If you have a very flighty student who cannot get into it, you can prepare the page the night before, but involvement is better as much as possible.

It is best, to avoid giving false clues, if the format of the pages and illustrations is consistent. Use plain white paper as backing for all illustrations, with all distractors cut out. You can use the bottom of a large juice can to trace standard-sized circles to put the illustrations in, or you can cut three-inch or four-inch squares Cut out all distractors and *just* illustrate the object wanted – for example if the key word is “overalls”, cut off the head and arms and feet of the model and *just* keep the overalls. Glue the illustrations, in their standard sized frames, on the page under the textured letter.

What key words to use? As a general rule, avoid cuteness. We are not trying to be cute, we are trying to learn something. Specifically, key words should:
- be picturable concrete nouns as much as possible. Actions are ambiguous and opinions or emotions are guesswork. Sometimes unavoidable but limit as far as possible.
- be ordinary objects as much as possible in the personal experience of the student, or zoo animals that he likely knows well from pictures or hopefully from a zoo visit.
- have the target letter/group always as the initial sound (for consistency), except for x and the vowel sounds of y which never occur (with normal x sound) in the initial position.
- illustrate the sound clearly, not be slurred in usual pronunciation.
- not combine in blends that may change the sound; for example some people pronounce truch as chruck and dress as jress, so these are *not* good words for t and d.

Here is my personal list of keywords (copyright, thanks). Please see notes above before changing to others that you think are “easier”. If a child is not familiar with one of the words, alternates (where I found any) are separated by slashes, eg oatmeal/overalls

a. apple – apron/acorn – arm & awful
illustrate awful with the “yucky face” from a poison warning; note both arm and awful have the “aw” sound, same piece of backing paper, no need to make ar a fourth sound. Cut the hand and shoulder off so the picture is *just* an arm.
b. ball
c. cat – ceiling
d. dog
e. elephant – eagle/ear – Earth
for ear (and later nose) it is easy to cut a large photo of a model from a magazine and cut out just the desired part
f. fish
g. girl – giraffe
h. house
i. indian/igloo/ink – ice cream
note – keep indian with *lower case* for now – we learn capitals after. Ice cream is most clearly illustrated with a cone.
j. jam jar
k. kite
l. leaf
m. moon
n. net/nose
o. octopus – oatmeal/overalls – orange
For oatmeal take a picture from an ad with the Quaker and the steaming bowl
p. pencil/pen
qu. queen/quilt/quarter
Always present qu as the digraph (two-letter pattern); in English, q never ever appears alone, and the u following does *not* stand for any sound but goes in the digraph to make a “kw” sound.
r. rabbit
s. sun
The “z” sound of s is hard to illustrate, and since it’s the voiced form of the same sound it can be treated as a variant without getting too fussy.
t. turtle/top
u. umbrella & up – uniform/unicorn
For umbrella and up, show the umbrella in the up (open) position, and draw a big fat arrow pointing up beside it. Be sure the student pronounces the *whole* word, *um* brella, and not just brella.
v. violin/van
w. watch
x. *END* of box (write the word, which by the time you get to x the child can sound out, and underline the x at the end, make it fatter, draw it in red, anything to make it stand out clearly. Note that x stands for the sound “ks” in normal use; avoid “xylophone” which is misleading about the sound.)
y. yellow - *END* of sky - *END* of baby (see note above for end sounds on x) - *middle* of gym
z. zipper/zebra

Later for the digraphs, you make similar pages for:

th. thumb/three
(Don’t use three unless the student can already count and recognize numerals!)
sh shoe
ch chair
wh whistle/whale
ng *END* of swing & wrong/song
*Don’t* just teach “ing”; ng can appear after *all* short vowels, hang, strength, sing, long, rung – it is very, very difficult to unteach a child who has been taught to say always “ing” and reads sang as sa-ing. Illustrate wrong with 2 + 2 = 5 and a big red X through it, or song with a printed sheet of music if the student recognizes that.

For the digits 1 to 9 you do exactly the same as above and make up nine pages with a corduroy number, same size and format as the letters. Under the numeral you make a nice pattern of dots to count on your same white paper backing as the key words. JUST nice neat dots, big and fat 1 inch (2.5 cm) or more, in one or two rows. NO bunnies and leprechauns – avoid all distractors, you just want the number in its very simplest form.

Present zero after the other numbers – it’s a funny concept, a symbol for nothing. The illustration for zero is a blank backing paper, nothing on it.

Do not present ten and higher yet; the fact that ten is written one-zero is a big conceptual step in math and comes after we get the basics down.

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OK, lots of info there but you are going to use this for a long time as you go through all twenty-six letters and four digraphs and ten digits.
Do *one* letter now and go back and look at the notes for the next one.

So, you have a page made with a textured letter, guide arrows, and one or two or three illustrations, each separate sound on its own separate backing paper.

First you have the student trace the letter in proper directionality. Watch and correct – yes this *is* of great importance. If necessary, gently guide his hand over it.
If the student is helped by verbal directions, describe the directions in terms of top, middle, and bottom lines, and moving forward, back, up, and down and around *only*. Please no bunnies going into holes – avoid distractors! If the student seems to find verbal directions confusing, stick to tracing and guiding.

At the *same* time as the student is tracing the letter, you say *and* have the student say either the name or the major sound of the letter.
There is some argument whether names or sounds should be taught first. Logically, sounds are much more useful and would be best first. In practical fact, almost all students have been exposed to names, either through kids’ TV programming or previous teaching. Therefore I teach *both* name and sounds together, true less simple and direct than just sound but we deal with the background we have. So we have “A (ay) – aaa, ay, aw; B (bee) – b-b-b; C (see) – k-k-k, sss; etcetera

We name the key pictures and say the sounds very very stressed and drawn out:
A – apple – aaaaaa – aaaaaaapple
—apron – ay-ay-ay-ay — ay-ay-ay-aypron
— arm – aw-aw-aw-aw – aw-aw-aw-arm – awful – aw-aw-aw-awful

Have the child say each sound long drawn out and clear and repeat this over and over.

Many or most kids will try to “simplify”. They will try and try to read in a hieroglyphic fashion, where one symbol represents a whole word or idea unit. This is a natural human characteristic, actually a sign of intelligence, trying to fill in patterns ahead of all the info. Unfortunately thousands of years of experience have proved that hieroglyphic reading, although quick for the first few symbols, hits a dead end when the number of words and ideas gets larger. A phonetic alphabet by contrast can represent millions of words with a limited number of symbols. So when your student tries to jump ahead and says “A says apple”, sorry, nip this in the bud. It’s cute and sweet and bright, and it’s a dead end so don’t cute your kid into a problem to unteach later. Stress over and over that A *just* stands for the aaaa sound, *NOT* the whole word.

There is also some discussion about teaching short vowels or long vowels first. (So-called short and long – these names have nothing to do with the facts of English speech, bad terminology but we are historically stuck with it.) Long vowels are the same as the letter names and so if letter names have been drilled they may seem (repeat only seem) more “natural” or “easier”. Unfortunately long vowels have spelling variants and a silent second vowel, making things more complicated. Short vowels are spelled simply with the single letter so most programs start with short.
My personal compromise: I present all three common sounds of the vowel, as above. The student is going to need all three of these sounds as soon as possible because all three are used in any normal writing. After the first presentation, when the student has it in the back of his brain that the letter *can* represent a few different sounds, *but* a limited number with consistency and predictability, then I go back and stress that the short vowel is the *first and most important sound* and we will do the rest later. Then I go into a good phonics workbook which teaches the short sound thoroughly in Book 1 and the long sounds and spelling patterns in Book 2.
Similarly for the two sounds of c and g.

If you are doing twenty minutes at a time for a young child, or if your student needs extra time, just making the page will be day one and practicing the tracing and the sound may be all of day two. That’s OK! After two days he knows one more letter than he did before, and in two or three months he’ll know them all, which is more than he knew after the past two months. Also, once a student gets into mastering things, he often speeds up. Old saying: make haste slowly.
If you are dealing with an older student an hour at a time, as I do, then you start right into the next phase the first hour – but do NOT rush ahead with a second letter, there is still plenty to do to get this one mastered.

Once the student has traced the letter in correct directionality several times and has repeated the sounds with you several times, you move to a whiteboard with wipe-off markers or a blackboard and chalk. It is very good if you can mount this on the wall. If not, at least prop it up at an angle like a drawing board or easel.
It is *vital* that the student not half-lie on the table and press his body weight on a pencil. This is fatiguing and stresful and leads to all manner of counterproductive writing habits that are terribly difficult to unteach later. If your older student has these unproductive habits – hooked hand, gripping the pencil in a death grip, gripping right at the point, leaning his head over so his eye is almost touching the page, not seeing what he is writing and making bizarre errors from focusing only on one letter, lying on the left arm to give more leverage to weight the pencil, and complaining bitterly about having to write more than a sentence , no surprise when it is so physically demanding to do these contortions – then this is the time, now, to stop them. It takes hard work to break a long-term habit – but if you leave it longer it will be even harder to break later.

You have the student look at the letter in the binder, trace the letter in the binder, and then form the same letter on the board. Nice and big, a couple of inches high or even bigger. Smooth flowing arm motions. Watch directions! *AS* he writes the letter, he says the major sound. Either just the sound, or name-and-sound: “Ay – aaa” If he can’t form the letter solo, you print it large and clear on the board in a light colour, mark a point for the start dot, and he traces it. If he can’t trace, you gently guide his hand a few times and then let him try solo.
Do a whole row or two of nice large letters. JUST todays letter. JUST lower-case. Avoid the temptation to jump ahead and over-elaborate, which all of us teachers just love to do.

In later lessons, after he knows a number of letters, you then write a few simple decodable words (sat, sam, mass, tam) on the board, using today’s letter in all of them and reviewing previously taught ones. Nice *extremely large* smooth printing. At first you stick with short vowel words until you have taught the long vowel patterns. Exception for high-frequency words which are taught separately *but* the same approach, see more below. You sound the words out *slowly*, pointing at each letter as you draw it out l…o….ng. He says the sounds with you. Then he traces each letter in direction, feeling its shape, and simultaneously he says the sound for each letter. Then you have him go over it faster and faster, a little timy bit more speed each time, modeliing for him as you speed up, until he gets the blended word. Mmmmmm –— aaaaaaaaaa –––-nnnnnnnn, mmm—aaa—nnn, mm-aa-nn, m-a-n, man.

OK, he has traced the letter in the binder, said the sounds that go with it and the key words to remember them, traced and/or written it on the board and repeated the major sound, in later lessons has practiced blending and sounding out some words with that letter – nope, not done yet, there are still more games we can play, more things we can do (said the Cat in the Hat)
Now you say the major sound – short aaaa for a, for our first example – and brainstorm words with that sound in them, in various positions. For beginning short a, apple, ant, alligator, actor, animal, ad, … You write these down in a notebook and say the list over with him. One page in notebook or duotang for words with each letter. If you can cartoon, illustrate as many as possible; not absolutely necessary but fun. For medial short a, cat, hat, pan, ran, sad, dad, … In English there are *no* ordinary words with the full sound of short a at the end, although you can use a cartoon of a sheep saying “baaaa”. Do NOT use words like Santa for final a, (OK for medial), nor puma etc. because the final letter is not giving the full pronunciation but is dropped to the schwa or “uh” sound, which at this stage would be more confusing.
Now, as you are trying to get him to brainstorm words for the sound, at first he is not going to have a clue. Most students will try to brainstorm for meaning – if you start with ant and alligator he will come up with all sorts of animal names and a story about the zoo, or if you start with dad he will come up with all sorts of people’s names or stories about what he and dad did. This is the time to be mean and rigid and insist that he answer the question being asked. Praising him for going off topic is not going to straighten out his reading problems (of course be patient with the very young child, but keep directing). Keep stressing the *sound* you are dealing with, give an example of the *sound*, have him repeat the same sound, and then see again if he can come up with a word. The first time you try this you may get exhausted and feel that this is never going to work. Keep at it! By the tenth letter or so most kids will be getting the idea. If not, keep providing models and repeating. If the student rhymes, that is a very good start, but you want to stress breaking apart farther – a rhyme is vowel-plus-consonant, but you want *just* the single sound. If he goes man – can – pan – Dan etc., start a new line with pat – sat – hat, and another with dad – sad – bad – and so on. Stress they all have the same aaa sound but you can change the endings. Take time; this is a new idea and will take a lot of work, but it is worth it. This is the foundation of spelling skills and makes a world of difference later.
Before you leave your target letter, now is a good time to do some workbook work. I use a good series called Check and Double Check from Scholar’s Choice. There are also some good backup books, even more basic, from Phonovisual. Both are available on the web. Scholar’s Choice is quick delivery, Phomnovbisual is very slow but their sound charts are worth waiting for.
I prefer to work in order through the books from beginning to end. However, there is the problem that you need vowels. You can do the short vowel as introduction, do the consonants, and go back and re-do the vowel (photocopy the page for the first try and go back and do it again when you get there.) There will be exercises where for example you circle all the words that have the short aaa sound in them, exercises where you fill in the missing letter if it is an a. etc., and often good printing practice. If you do a vowel first, you may have to leave some of the other exercises for later after you have more consonants, OK plan to cycle around. The first time your student does this he may again look utterly lost; or an older student may have counterproductive copy-fast-without-thinking strategies. Work through the work *with* the student. Read the instructions aloud. (Later, the student himself must read the directions aloud to you, a step towards independence – he can’t really work independently until he can read directions consistently).. Make sure he *says* out loud the sample words given as models. Make sure he works left-to-right and top-to-bottom through the exercise and pictures, no random circling or moving back tto front. (avoid teaching counterproductive strategies). Make sure he *does* the question meaningfully, not just copying a everywhere because he guesses that is what is expected, or copying the first letter of each word down the column, etc.

Whew. I’ve typed ten pages all about teaching ONE letter. You will need two hours, spread over two to six days, to do all that. Isn’t there a faster, more efficient way? One more time, your student has failed the “faster” “”efficient”” ways for three to ten years or more – if they are so much faster why is he still stuck here? (And if you are working with a very young student, he has time, no rush, why hurry up to make mistakes?) Go slowly, get it right the first time, get it solid, and then move on. It isn’t wasted time, it’s time *invested* in learning – real learning, not guess and fake.

The second day, you go back and review all this – trace the textured letter, say its name, say its sounds and the key words (remembering NOT “a says apple” but rather “a says aaaa aaa, aaa for apple”), once you get a few words down decoding the words left on the board from yesterday, saying the words on the list in the notebook and maybe adding some.
Then you start the next letter and do **exactly the same thing, the whole process.**

It is better not to do consonants in alphabetical order, but in order of usefulness in constructing decodable words. The consonants m, s, t are particularly useful as in the examples above. One way to organize is to do one vowel, then four or five consonants in the order presented by your good phonics book, then a second vowel, etc. By the time you have three letters you can construct a couple of words (sam, mass).By the time you have ten letters you can make over a hundred words.
After presenting two or three new letters, you have a review lesson and go back over all the previous letters. Make haste slowly. Learn two or three new facts, cumulative total review, repeat.
You do two or three letters a week on average, maybe only one, maybe up to four but no more because you need to review on Friday. At this rate you finish the alphabet in two months, very reasonable, and at one letter a week you still finish it in six months which is better than where you are now.
Remember the story of a man who was planting an oak tree. A passerby asked him how long it would take to mature. The gardener answered fifty years. The passerby laughed at him and said he was foolish because he would be an old man or even die before he could enjoy it. The gardener then said well, he’s better hurry and get at it as fast as possible. Same here. If it’s going to take a couple of years or even more to get this reading thing down, start now and get at it; delaying for years waiting for magic to teach is only going to make the process even longer.
Keep stressing all the senses and their connections: Visual – looking at the model letter. Tactile – feeling the letter in texture. Kinesthetic – tracing the letter and writing it over and over, *large* and loose with arm motion. Keep writing each and every new word *while* sounding it out. If two letters get confused, trace the shapes or air-write them. Auditory - *say* the sound at the time you are forming the letter.
Do not skip the tracing and writing and sounding steps in an effort to be more *efficient*. Getting confused and having to reteach and unteach is NOT efficient. Having to go back and re-do all the spelling you skipped is NOT efficient.

Once your student has a good grip on this whole idea, that letters stand for sounds, how the letters are formed and how to tell them apart by feeling the shapes, that he can figure out new words independently by sounding them out – a stage that may happen in a few weeks, or that may take a couple of months, don’t worry and we’ll get there – then it is time to get into teaching with developmental books and high-frequency words.
High-frequency words are those things like the, is, an, here, and so on, that make up over half of every word on a written page. Unfortunately they tend not to be simple short vowel words. But don’t let anyone tell you that the are “impossible” to decode and have to be memorized by brute force! That is a fallacy. The only truly horrible cases are the two words one and once, which start with an unwritten w sound. Every other word has *at least* consonant clues and often just a variant vowel.
This is where the idea of teaching all the common sounds to each letter comes into its own. For example the word here has the long e sound and not the short. OK, we admitted from the beginning that e stands for three common sounds as in elephant, eagle, and Earth. So this is just the second sound – true we have been drilling the first but well, this is the second. And the e at the end of here is silent, a rule to learn is that most of the time we don’t say e at the end, only in little tiny words like me.
Now the word the starts with the digraph th. Time to add a page to our binder with th for thumb, and practice saying words thumb, thistle, three, bath, and the voiced variant in this, that, there, they, them, brother, father, mother. The word the has the muttered schwa sound of e – fine, we already admitted this sound at the start of the model word Earth. So this is a straightforward word to teach and does NOT have to be memorized and confused with a for life, as half my students do.
The books that I use for this ultra-beginner stage are the OLD Ladybird Key words series starting with 1a and 1b and if at all possible the workbooks that go with them, going up to level 5 or 6, at which point the child is reading and can move into any first reader. This series introduces new words gradually, repeats them heavily, has only seventeen words total in level 1, and uses longer more meaningful sentences than most others.
In this kind of developmental reading series, new words are listed (Ladybird lists right on the page, others at the back). Many books are well-written, just make sure you have a series with planned presentation of frequent vocabulary and planned repetition. You *actively teach* each new word – write it on the board and have the student trace it and copy it, stressing our left-to-right order. *Sound it out with him*, telling him the long vowels, silent letters, digraphs like th, and irregular sounds like the o in some and come sounding more like u. Write each word on a file card, printed neatly in marker, and every few days review the packet of words you have built up. Keep them in a file box and see how the files grow. Do the workbook exercises for more practice of various interesting sorts. Yes, make a fuss over each and every word just as you did with every letter. No guessing, we are learning this solidly as a basis for life-long habits.
As you move into books, capitals and punctuation will be used. Ladybird notes which new capitals are used at which levels. Cut the capital (and the variant shapes of a and g) out of construction paper – still tactile but less stressed than the lower case – and glue it onto the appropriate page of your binder, in the bottom corner. Trace the capital, also top to bottom and left to right, be firm. When the student is writing, lower case is the standard, period. I don’t even demand capitals on names untill several months along. You do one or two pages and a couple of new high-frequency words per day. Evey couple of days you get to a new capital, again one at a time.
For punctuation, as you are reading orally, teach the child to stop at periods. This is important; learning it after the fact is difficult. Dividing spoken sentences at the period is a vital first step in fluency. Also encourage writing periods when the student writes sentences, punctuate *as you go*. Ladybird only uses periods in early levels and introduces other marks gradually. As you develop more reading skill with your student, teach them that an exclamation point means excited (louder voice), a comma means take a breath, a question mark means asking something and your tone rises, and later that quotation marks mean somebody is talking, like a cartoon balloon.
Speaking of reading orally, the child reads every page out loud to you. No exceptions. In general reading each page once my be enough. Sometimes it’s a good thing to review a chapter or a book. But the idea is NOT to read over and over and memorize, which is often counterproductive. Better to read two or three different books at each difficulty level and maintain an interst in the stories, than to drill to death one book.

You start the little pre-primer books once the student knows ten or so letters and has the idea that letters stand for sounds and sounds build words. You continue learning new letters as you progress through the pre-primer levels of developmental books. You can teach each letter (and digraph) formally in the order they are needed for the books, or you can teach the words by telling the student the letter, modelling it, and then re-teaching it formally later. Both approaches work. You finish the alphabet with the least common patterns (qu, x) and the pre-primer first forty or fifty common words around the same time.
By this point the student is usually picking up much faster and may be beginning to blossom as a reader. Good! But don’t give up the practice, particularly the writing and spelling by sound – you must do this sooner or later, so do it right at the beginning – and work through the phonics book in detail plus the workbooks for the readers. All of these give the student a firm base to work on later, while skipping ahead in a hurry means having to play catch-up forever.
I find that most students can finish the alphabet, Phonics Book 1, and the primer level (old Ladybird 3 and 4 and their workbooks) in four to six months. That’s an average and there are too many variables to predict exactly, but it gives you an idea. Then most students can finish the first half of Phonics Book 2, old Ladybird 5 and 6 and their workbooks, and most of any well-designed First Reader and its workbook by the end of Grade 1. Once you achieve this, (a) you have a real reader and can start to read for enjoyment and information (b) with the ability to sound out independently and a wide reading vocabulary and confidence in word attack, the child is well ahead of the average for Grade 1. If you are doing remediation with an older student it may go faster, but this is not a race.