Teaching letters sounds... Efficiently: A Montessori Lesson.

Let’s learn our letter sounds, shall we?
Montessori was a scientist. She observed! She hypothesized. She tested. She observed some more. So please understand when I say... her methods are sound ;)

[knowthepillarsofdemocracy]

I applaud you bringing these points to light!

I'm not totally sure of this, but I agree with Lauren below...I think there is evidence that at a certain points, letter names does help with the process called orthographic mapping, which is the magical process of the brain mapping strings of sounds to strings of letters...but to get to be able to do that you do first need to have many experiences of decoding the words, ideally using the correct phonemes that you demonstrate here.

I've also heard the letter qu as /koo/ and w as /oo/, in addition to y as /long e/. So interesting!

Love your presentation and your sunniness! Thanks for advocating for using the letter sounds that help kids more, for educating about the schwa that too often is attached to the letter sound! As they say, "schwa happens, " but you have helped it happen less!

[Knitterbug]

While I agree that we need to focus on the sounds for pre-reading, it is important to note that the letter NAMES are not useless! Letters share some of the same phonetic sounds and are used to spell words. For example, the long “a” sound. By your definition, it would only include the “a” sound, yet the letter a has multiple sounds associated, long and short. Also - the long a can have the “spelling” eigh, ay, ey, ei. The letters are very important when learning to read! Sounds and letters are not a perfect match. It is better to use the term “phoneme” for the sound, which is what you are actually talking about, not the letter itself.