A DVD sporting the simple title Letter Sounds may sound unimpressive. Teaching letter sounds, how hard can that be? Well, if you’ve ever taught children to read you’ll know that structured, consistent, repetitive practice is required in order to teach young ones the basic building blocks of the written English language.
Rock ‘N Learn’s Letter Sounds DVD both meets those requirements and tackles much more than simple letter sounds: introducing the alphabet, learning the short sounds of the vowels and consonants, fun ‘interactive’ tests, guiding children into blending, an introduction to consonant blends, sight words, and reading full sentences. It does all that in a fun-filled, bright, musical DVD that has drawn both my three-year-old and six-year-old into repeating letter names, sounds and has my older child reading along.
Recommended for children from four- to seven-years-old who are just beginning their phonics education, I recommend that parents interested in teaching the alphabet, sounds, and early reading skills to pick up the disc before teaching their child the alphabet song. Letter Sounds opens with a lively performance of “The New Alphabet Song”, a jazzy, rocky tune that allows for clear enunciation of each letter. It’s about time parents had a new version to work with, young children often believe that “lmnop” is one letter due to the slur in the traditional tune. Rock ‘N Learn’s version features clear spaces between each letter name, and is followed by a spoken chant so that children won’t rely upon the tune alone. Flashing letters that flip from upper to lower case along with the song effectively combine audio and visual learning strategies to reach children.
After the alphabet is introduced, the short sounds for each letter are presented from A to Z. The upper-case and lower-case letter appear in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. A talking mouth that speaks and clearly demonstrates how to form each letter sound with the mouth, teeth, and tongue appears in the upper right hand corner. A visual illustrating the word spoken appears in the lower half of the screen. For the letter D the mouth says, “Dee, d, d, dog”, after which the word ‘dog’ appears beneath the capital and lower case “d”s on screen. The mouth then repeats the information, allowing for children to join him on the second repetition. Not only is this an effective way to convey the sound information for each letter, it is also useful for children learning to clearly pronounce each sound in their daily speech. Children in speech therapy, or those still working on a few problem sounds can benefit greatly from this portion of the disc.
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