WEBVTT

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Most people, even a lot of teachers we've worked with, as you know,

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will confuse the idea of a letter with the idea of a sound because we have a problem in English.

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We have 26 letters and 40 to 44 speech sounds to spell those, so of course you have

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to use letter combinations to spell some of them.

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And then we have several spellings for some sounds and several sounds for some spellings.

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So, you know, if we count the number of sounds in "shoe," there are two, "sh" and "oo."

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Even though there are 4 letters.

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Many adults, if I ask them to tell me the number of sounds in the word

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"six" will tell me that there are 3.

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They'll go "sss...i...x."

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But the way I count those sounds is "sss...i...ck...sss."

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And the way I would prove that is that "sick" has 3 sounds, "sss...i...ck,"

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and if you add a "sss," on to the end of "sick" you get "six."

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But it's confusing because we use 3 letters for 4 sounds.

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That's a revelation to a lot of people, but it's the most critical underlying skill

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that will help the children learn to read and spell.