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If children come to kindergarten not knowing most of their letters, then teachers need to plan intensive instruction in the early part of the school year. Children without alphabet knowledge in today’s kindergartens may be at risk in the current environment of high expectations. Twenty years ago children were expected to learn to read in first grade. Now children are being retained in kindergarten if they are not able to read at proscribed levels. A “letter a week” will not cut it—27 weeks is more than two thirds into the school year.

What should instruction in alphabet look like? Along with systematic coverage of the letters, teachers should be sure that students are shown why letter knowledge is important. Activities such as “name of the day” (Cunningham, 1995) and interactive writing (Button, Johnson & Furgeson, 1996) not only show students how letters are used to record important information but teach a variety of concepts related to print. Asking students to write, spelling as best they can, to label drawings, and to make journal entries is another impetus for learning letters. Children can take part in shared reading (Holdaway, 1979) even if their alphabet knowledge is limited. Indeed, shared reading, in which children use their memory and knowledge of language to support their initial attempts to read, is one more way to demonstrate the value of learning those letters. Teachers should direct children’s attention to letters on charts, in big books, in little books, on posters, on T-shirts, and everywhere print occurs. Children are most likely to master letters quickly when they are seeing them and using them all day long for a variety of purposes.

Alphabet knowledge includes not only visual recognition but knowledge of the letter names, and letter names give children insight into the sounds they represent (Adams, 1990, Bear et al, 2004). The letter name for B is “bee” and it starts with /b/. The letter name for M is “em” and it ends with /m/. There are some letters that offer no clue such as H or W and some offer less useful clues such as the soft sounds of C and G but if students are exposed to alphabet books and activities that pair letters and sounds then they will begin to use letter names as a clue to sound correspondences.

Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness refers to the ability to consciously attend to sound segments of our spoken language: to syllables, onsets, and rimes, and to the smallest units known as phonemes. Phoneme tasks involve segmenting sounds in words (cat = /c/a/t/) as well as blending sounds, deleting sounds, and substituting sounds. In study after study, various measures of phonological awareness have consistently been highly correlated with success in beginning reading (Juel 1983, Adams 1990, NRP 2000, etc.). For example, Maclean, Bradley, and Bryant (1987) found that children who knew nursery rhymes and were able to identify rhyming words were more successful at learning to read than children without this kind of knowledge. Curiously, the role of phonological awareness received widespread attention in only the last fifteen years or so. Prior to that, reading teachers talked of auditory discrimination as a factor. but we now understand that much more is involved than is suggested by that term. It should come as no surprise therefore that parents and even many teachers are not fully aware of the role that it plays and are often confused about how it differs from phonics.

Phonological awareness is not something parents understand well enough to directly teach their children before school because it is an oral skill and much more abstract than the very concrete and well-defined task of naming or writing letters. Still, parents who share alphabet books, read rhyming books, such as those by Dr. Suess, and help their children memorize songs and jingles are helping their children develop some aspects of phonological awareness indirectly. It is a rare parent who models phoneme segmentation or blending, so children are much more likely to enter kindergarten with limited phonological awareness than with limited alphabet knowledge.

Fortunately research shows that most children can be taught phonological awareness as a means to enhance early reading achievement (i.e., Bradley & Bryant, 1983: Ball & Blachman, 1988). Such instruction need not take a lot of time (NRP, 2000), but some instructional time is critical. Teachers in kindergarten and first grade should plan activities that address phonological awareness and many resources are available including games and software. While children are learning about letters in the activities listed earlier, they can also learn about sounds. Nursery rhymes are a natural resource for not only listening pleasure and memorizing but also shared reading. During interactive writing teachers model writing letters and segmenting words into sounds. It turns out that phonological awareness, although it need not involve print since it is an oral language skill, is most readily learned in connection with print (Bradley and Bryant 1983). As children are asked to match the sounds they can hear to the letters they know, phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge are coming together and this is what we know as phonics.

Phonics
Phonics knowledge depends upon those two important factors noted earlier. No phonics program will be successful unless children have alphabet knowledge and some degree of phonological awareness. It seems necessary to say something about what phonics is not before we talk about what it is. Phonics is not a method for teaching children to read. It is a tool, a knowledge set that enables children to understand the alphabetic nature of our writing system and as such it facilitates young readers’ efforts to both read and spell. All reputable reading programs include some attention to phonics and this has been the case for many years, especially since the publication of Jean Chall’s book, Learning to Read: The Great Debate in 1967. Her findings helped put an end to purely “look-say” programs. However, in all those years no phonics-based reading program has surfaced that makes learning to read especially easy. Phonics is no quick fix as some proponents would have us believe. Literature-based programs have been criticized for the lack of systematic instruction but even phonics-intensive programs that teach isolated sounds and how to blend them together before children read even one word of carefully constructed decodable text have not been dramatically more effective when carefully researched. No best method of teaching phonics has ever been established even though research does consistently show that students who have phonics knowledge get off to a better start in reading (Stahl, Duffy-Hester, & Stahl, 1998).

Why is there not a more dramatic difference? That may be because children learn phonics in at least two different ways. To begin with, children teach themselves phonics when they induce letter sound relationships in the process of reading (Thompson, 1999). They construct their own understanding of the phonic system as they match their oral language to print (Stahl, Duffey-Hester & Stahl, 1998). Initially this print may have been memorized in familiar predictable books or from charts such as our example of Sam, Sam. Students with alphabet knowledge and phonemic awareness have a distinct advantage in such self-teaching since they are more likely to notice how the sounds they say match to the letters on the page. Because some children are capable of teaching themselves phonics we should never withhold engaging whole text at the same time we are instituting a systematic phonics program. To do so limits the phonics knowledge many children are capable of learning for themselves. Children in literature-based programs that de-emphasize the systematic teaching of phonics must rely on self-teaching to learn phonics. The children who become skilled readers induce it for themselves through lots of reading practice just as children must have done during the “look-say” era of Dick and Jane. Unfortunately we cannot be sure that all children are able to do this effectively enough to make the kind of progress needed for success in school.

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