Educating Young Children Volume 1 - Winter 2026 | Page 85

At bedtime, when my( coauthor Sonia Cabell’ s) son was about 3 1 / 2 years old, we were talking about circles. Suddenly, his eyes widened, and he exclaimed,“ I know! S is for circle!” I was thrilled because he was showing his understanding of the alphabetic principle. He perceived circle as a word independent from the shape. He could hear that it started with an / s / sound, and he knew that s represents the / s / sound( although in this word, it is spelled by the letter c, which can also represent the / s / sound).

Young children love to play with the sounds in words. Many find it silly and entertaining, and all of this fun helps build the foundation for reading and writing. As children gain an understanding that oral language can be broken into smaller sounds( known as phonological awareness), they can apply this information by connecting individual sounds( phonemes) to the letters or groups of letters( graphemes) that represent these sounds.

In Chapter 3 of our book, Literacy Learning for Infants, Toddlers, and Preschoolers: Key Practices for Educators, we describe ways that teachers can support young children’ s development of phonological awareness and their understandings of the relationship between sounds and letters. These are exciting and important foundational understandings that move children toward conventional reading and writing. At the same time, these concepts are likely to vary across languages, and we explore this diversity as well. In this article, we share information specifically related to explaining phonological awareness and alphabet instruction.

Of all the phonological awareness skills, the two most important in English are

› Phonemic blending(/ f /, / a /, and / n / can be blended together to say / fan /), which is necessary for reading

› Phonemic segmentation( the sounds in map are / m /, / a /, and / p /), which is necessary for spelling( and supports reading as well)