Today, children are taught to read using phonics, which is all about the sounds that make up words. Children start by learning the letters and the sounds they make, and how to put them together to ...

Her research found that 3- and 4-year-olds were "highly engaged" during 15-minute phonics lessons ... Some children may become interested in the letters in their name, and want to copy them down or ...

Heidi Anne E. Mesmer is a professor in literacy in the school of education at Virginia Tech. Her latest book is Letter Lessons and First Words: Phonics Foundations That Work (Heinemann, 2019).

So, at its most basic, children are taught to read the letters in a word like c-a-t, and then merge them to pronounce the word cat. A phoneme can be represented by one, two, three or four letters ...