From Sound to Symbol: Effective Practices for Beginning Readers

Early literacy instruction needs productive noise, not quiet guesswork.

When young children learn to read, the room shouldn’t be silent. Early literacy learning should be a time of productive noise. Students should be saying sounds aloud and connecting them to letters and spellings. This also helps all educators give corrective feedback, which strengthens understanding and guides students towards fluency. We need to link the ears, mouth, and mind because this creates stronger memory pathways, which helps learning to stick. Effective instruction in the preschool years and beyond sets children on the right track and helps teachers identify who needs extra support.

Most Children Need Teaching

A rich home environment, shelves full of books, and frequent library visits are wonderful for building curiosity and a love of stories. A love of stories and books can be caught from parents, teachers, and librarians. But these experiences can’t replace instruction.

Most children don’t naturally discover how letters and sounds fit together, nor can they work out the different spellings that make up words. Explicit teaching and lots of repetition can make all the difference.

Why Productive Noise Helps

When I work with beginning readers, I constantly remind them to say the sounds as they write. It’s a simple habit with big benefits and teaches all students to:

• break words into smaller sound parts

• connect each sound to a written letter or group of letters

• blend sounds together when reading

  
  

This repetition builds the foundations of fluent reading and accurate spelling. It doesn’t happen overnight, but it does with consistent practice.

Learn more about the earliest steps of reading here.

Why Explicit Instruction Matters

Learning to read, spell, and write takes explicit, systematic instruction. This approach catches most students before they fall behind. Exposure to books and some instruction alone can’t guarantee this.

For a deeper look at why early instruction matters so much, go here.

What About Pictures?

Pictures are wonderful tools for discussion, imagination, and vocabulary building. But when children are first learning to decode, pictures can inadvertently encourage guessing rather than reading.

I never hide pictures, but I do shift the focus. When we’re practising decoding, I often use sentence strips or small passages without images. Check out my sentence packs here.

After reading, we add pictures to the text. This lets us check comprehension and gives students a chance to reread the text. This is repetition in context. Rereading helps confidence grow, but students often need a reason to reread. Adding pictures is the perfect prompt.  Check out my first decodable stories pack here.

The language we use can help our children to understand that letters are a written code. Sounds, letters and parts of words are part of a bigger system. Check out my blog post all about the alphabet here.

Early Success Builds Confidence

Early wins matter. They boost confidence, support self-esteem, and build momentum. When parents and teachers work together to tip the scales toward explicit instruction and decoding, supported by playful practice, we help every child step confidently into literacy.