If you’ve been following along since my last piece, you may have taken the free reading check and learned something specific about where your child is in early reading. Maybe the result confirmed what you suspected. Maybe it surprised you. Either way, if letter sounds came up as a skill to focus on, this article is for you.
And even if sounds weren’t flagged, you might want to read this anyway. Because there’s a mistake I’ve seen parents make over and over, with the best intentions in the world. I made a version of it myself when I was teaching.
We think we know what sounds letters make. Most of us don’t, quite.
Why this matters more than it seems
Early reading is built on a simple idea: letters represent sounds, and if a child knows those sounds precisely, they can decode words they’ve never seen before. That’s the whole mechanism. It’s elegant, and it works — but only if the sounds a child learns are accurate.
Here’s a concrete example. Imagine a parent teaching her daughter that the letter B makes the sound “buh,” that R makes “er,” and that G makes “guh.” The daughter practices diligently. Then she sits down to sound out the word “brag.” She produces something like “buh-er-a-guh.” She has no idea what word that is, because “buh-er-a-guh” isn’t a word anyone has ever said to her. She did everything right. The input was just off.
This isn’t a rare scenario. I’ve heard well-educated adults, including teachers, produce sounds this way when saying them in isolation. It’s not a matter of intelligence or effort. It’s that we learned to read so long ago, and we read so automatically now, that we’ve lost conscious access to what the sounds actually are.
The specific error to watch for
The most common mistake is adding a small “uh” sound after the letter sound, particularly with consonants. The correct sound for M is a continuous hum: /mmm/. But if you relax your mouth before the sound is fully finished, it comes out as /mmmuh/. Same with S, which should be a clean /sss/, not /suh/. And with the quick, crisp sounds like T, K, and P, the temptation to soften the ending is strong: /t/ becomes /tuh/, /k/ becomes /kuh/.
Try it right now with M. Keep your lips pressed together until the sound is completely done. Don’t let your mouth relax early.
That’s the difference. It sounds small. It is not small. A child who is learning sounds with those trailing syllables attached will have a much harder time blending them into words, because each sound carries extra baggage that doesn’t belong there.
There’s a free reference that can help
Once publishes a complete phoneme guide at tryonce.com/phonemes. A phoneme is just the technical term for a single sound in our language. English has 44 of them, and the guide has a card for each one, with the letter or letters that represent it, an example word, and a short video demonstrating how to produce it precisely.
It is built as a curriculum reference, but it works just as well as a self-check for parents. If you’re not sure whether you’re saying a sound correctly, look it up before you practice it with your child. That five-minute investment will pay off in cleaner, faster learning.
One more thing worth knowing: speech delays don’t mean reading delays
Parents sometimes pull back from reading practice when a child struggles to pronounce a particular sound in speech. If a child says “wug” instead of “rug,” a parent might assume it’s too early to work on reading.
It isn’t. Speech sound development follows its own timeline. Some sounds, like /b/, /m/, and /p/, come early. Others, like /r/ and /th/, often don’t fully arrive until first or second grade. But a child who says “wug” in casual conversation and then sounds out the word “rug” as “wug” is, technically, reading. She has connected the letter to its sound and produced the word. The pronunciation will catch up. The reading doesn’t have to wait for it.
This is one of the more freeing things I learned as a teacher. You don’t need to correct every mispronunciation before you move forward. You just need to keep building.
A note on next steps
If sounds are the skill you’re focusing on, talk to your child’s teacher about what they’re working on in class and how you can reinforce it at home without duplicating or conflicting with the school’s approach. There are also structured programs that teach sounds in a deliberate, research-aligned sequence, with built-in pacing to help children stay on grade level. The right one depends on your child’s current skills, your schedule, and what you’re looking for. The phoneme guide is a starting point, not a complete program, but it’s a genuinely useful one.
Free phoneme reference with audio: tryonce.com/phonemes
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Sebastian Turner is a co-founder of Once, a science-of-reading-based early literacy program. He lives in Oakland, previously taught in the classroom, and is expecting his first child.
