Teaching Tips

Teaching Tip for June 2010

Had a customer ask me recently about whether I was planning to add a 'wh' card to the Phonics Sound Cards set. For others who might be wondering why it is missing, here'e my reply:

Great question!! I thought long and hard about that one – here’s my rationale. The majority of the ‘wh’ words that are important to kids are usually taught as sight words – who, what , when where, why, white, which. If you look in the dictionary at the ‘wh’ words the enunciation guide says ‘hw’. I never taught that to my kids – I found it very confusing for them to try to say ‘hw’. We just gave it the sound ‘w’ – and I think that is typical of how most people pronounce it. For that reason, I tended to do ‘wh’ as a silent letter pattern rather than a consonant digraph, as the 2-letter combination didn’t make a different sound (as it does with ch, th, sh) it simply made the sound of one of the letters, as is the pattern for silent letter combinations.

In leaving out a few combination patterns, I went with frequency as a guideline as well, and there aren’t that many ‘wh’ phonetic words (wheel, wheat, whip, whistle, whisker, whisper, whale,) that children will encounter on a regular basis.

I must say, it was really difficult to ‘draw the line’ on the patterns I chose, but frequency was a determining factor in order to keep the number manageable. Hope that helps.

Wishing everyone a smooth year-end!