Teaching Phonics

See the Sound - Visual Phonics is a system of 46 unique hand cues and symbols that represent the sounds of English. Included are the sounds commonly referred to as vowels, consonants, diphthongs and digraphs. It is somewhat of a simplified, visual, kinesthetic version of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

In English, there is not a consistent one-to-one correspondence between the letters in a word and the sounds those letters supposedly represent. Consider the words "dough," "through," "thought," "tough." In each case the "ough" stands for a completely different sound. Many beginning readers have no real problem with these ambiguities, but for others the "untrustworthiness" of English spelling becomes a life long handicap. It's too confusing for them and they simply never learn to decode well. They spend years in "remedial work" and never get the chance to read really deep or interesting text; many get frustrated and bored and end up giving up on reading entirely.

See the Sound - Visual Phonics has a way to break that cycle. Each student is taught a hand cue for each of the 46 sounds in English. Each hand cue is associated in some way with the production of the particular sound. The hand cue for the sound "t" makes is made by flicking the forefinger off the thumb at the same time the tongue "flicks" off the top of the mouth.

Video demonstration of Visual Phonics - consonants.

Visual Phonics information - http://seethesound.org/visual_phonics.html