The Phoneme Problem

When I was setting up this online store, I basically moved in cycles of “big breakthroughs” followed by “oh no another problem”. Once in a while, I’d work on some new topic, and then I’d realize that there was a much better way to do it. I would have gained so much experience creating resources for this topic, that I suddenly saw the light and realized a much more clever and effective way to do something.

On the one hand, this is good news. It means the things I make get better and better. It means I can continue working, as I know what to do and I know how to solve my problems now.

On the other hand, this is always a bit of a setback. Because it means scrapping some of the work I just did. Because it means having to get accustomed to this new idea and way of thinking, which obviously takes more effort than staying in the comfort zone of your skill/work habits. But, if we work through that and get to the other side, then I know I can make many more products again with my newfound skill.

As the title of this article suggests, this happened again when I worked on my resources about phonemes (or phonics).

The science is clear: starting with phonics is by far the most effective way to learn language. Most educational programs agree on this too, and they have a pretty solid order in which to explain the different parts of (the English) language. As such, I knew I needed a good resource on phonemes. In Level 1, at least, I wanted to start with those first one or two steps on this ladder. Just the simplest and most common sounds and that’s it.

But when it came time to make this, I suddenly realized I’d overlooked something massive.

Phonemes for Pre-Reader vs Reader

Almost all existing resources on phonemes are meant for readers. They were meant for children who had just learned the letters of the alphabet, and now had to learn what sound specific letters and letter combinations made. (Example: “The CH together makes the TSJJ sound, as in CHAIR.”) I could barely find anything about phonemes for pre-readers. Which was, you know, the part where I actually intended to put the resource and think it is most valuable.

I suddenly realized teaching phonemes actually had those two parts: teaching specific sounds that exist, and then, later, tying those sounds to alphabet letters. I did not want to combine them into one thing, because they aren’t one thing. It’s perfectly possible to learn about phonemes before learning about letters, and that’s the first resource I intended to make.

But that also meant that it would be a bit pointless to only do “the most common ones”. To only illustrate the 5–10 most common phonemes, give some exercises using easy words (that contain those sounds), and that’s it. If the whole goal of the resource is to build awareness of what phonemes are and which exist, then I basically have to show them all, don’t I? Then I have to make the resource a bit larger and more focused on that. It’s a bit pointless to say “here are some phonemes you might recognize, you will also know many words that don’t contain any of these sounds, but we’re not talking about them, enjoy!”

And so, on a Monday morning, when I had planned to create a small pre-reader phoneme resource this week … I could already throw the planning for this entire week in the bin.

Now, I had already created the quizzes for phonemes. Because they’re a quiz—a “test” you take AFTER learning something—they just test a variety of phonemes in a variety of ways. Not all of them need to appear. You don’t need to have seen all of them before, because the quiz contains sound samples (of both individual phonemes and words). I didn’t need to change the quizzes, fortunately, but my work on that did show me some more things I might want to explain in this resource:

• Stressed/Unstressed sounds (or syllables; without this, you can’t explain the most common phoneme of all, which is the Schwa—the “uh”)
• Voiced/Unvoiced sounds (without this, you just can’t explain why “f” and “v” are different to young kids)
• Some common tools for working with this, such as Elkonin Boxes.

I was overwhelmed by this for a few hours, until I started making some sense of it all. I remembered seeing these “posters” for alphabet letters. Like, one full page (A4 size) that is all about one letter (showing the uppercase, the lowercase, images of things that start with it, etcetera). Those posters are really nice because you can hang them around the classroom or the house. You can focus on one paper at a time, one letter at a time, and ignore everything else.

Why not do the same for phonemes?

If I dedicate one full page to each phoneme, I can do ~15 of the most common ones in one resource. Without bloating the page count or creating a massive amount of work for me. The remaining phonemes can then be done, in the same way, in a second resource in this category.

Creating Phoneme Posters

Now, of course, people have done this before. Once I knew what to search for, I could find images like that. But they made small posters for readers, as I said, instead of pre-readers. Posters that showed “look, these letters combined usually make this sound”.

I can’t do that! How do I make a full page “poster” make sense now? It’s very useless to print one huge “N” or “T” and write some example words that the teacher must read.

As you might know, I started this online store because the way most systems of education work is just very ineffective or even proven to be harmful to development. The best way to learn is to do lots of things in lots of different ways. Everyone learns better from getting information in a variety of ways, formats, media, etcetera. That’s the whole idea behind the main “Factions” of the website: even phonemes can be done in a more traditional way (teaching + exercises), but also quizzes, puzzles, escape rooms, board games about language, etcetera. If you simply try these different things, creating a mixture of phoneme lessons with it, I am absolutely certain anyone will learn very quickly and very effectively (and have a lot of fun doing it).

And so I came to my next realization. The reason why I really like this “poster” concept and wanted to use it to its full potential.

Imagine, for a moment, that we don’t do this. I take the easy way out. I create a few overfull pages that dryly list all phonemes. Then I create some pages with exercises about that pile of phonemes you just learned (e.g. “do these two things share a sound?”). Then I call it a day.

This is how most education is structured. This might make a lot of sense to you as you read it. But it’s not effective. I’ve seen it time and time again, and it’s why I moved away from it. Teaching a large bunch of things at the same time, in the same way, will just overwhelm and bore students. If you list all phonemes, they will have forgotten the first one as soon as you get to the fifth one, and they will have fallen asleep before you reach the end of the list. And for what? What use is it to hear a list of individual sounds?

No, the “poster” concept fixes this. It puts all the different ways to look at the same phoneme on the same page. This prevents overwhelming—you’re just focusing on this one sound, nothing else—while also making sure you use and explore the sound in different ways. Which is how I arrived at my answer:

• Every poster should state the sound (its simple name + official notation for those who want it)
• It should give one BIG example (written + image + decomposed)
• Then a list of smaller examples (varying between having the sound at the START, END, or MIDDLE)
• Then a bunch of varied exercises about this sound (so the “test” or “challenge” is on the same poster, and the questions asked are different each time)

This surely fills an entire page. In fact, now I had to be mindful of how to keep it clean and minimalist.

After some trial and error, I decided to do what most board games do: explain the general “lay-out” of the poster beforehand. So I can just use simple icons and no text on the posters itself. (In board games, such a lay-out schematic is used for explaining what every part of the board or the cards in your hand means.)

Keep It Simple and Split Projects

What about the other things to explain? I decided that this resource was now full enough and could only handle one extra thing. So I decided to end with an “explainer” on stressed/unstressed and then explain the “Schwa”. It’s by far the most common sound, because almost all unstressed vowels are pronounced like that. It’s too important to leave out here.

But everything else was moved to the second resource on phonemes. Which would include some ~15 more posters too. I purposely moved any voiced/unvoiced sounds to that one, so it didn’t need to be explained in the first one.

In the end, work on these resources took way longer than planned. They became bigger, but also much much better, and more complete, and more effective. That’s why I usually ignore that downside of having to throw away work and put in extra effort—because in the end, it’s always worth it.

But it still left me with one final issue.

I planned this as one small resource worth maybe 5 euros. Now I had two resources that were full of incredibly valuable work and a staggering number of posters/images/helpful tools. Do I raise the price? Should I split it into even more separate resources? Am I trying to do too much for pre-readers now?

I’m very good at asking myself all those kinds of questions and doubting what I’m doing. After all those years, I think I’ve found a nice balance between self-reflection and just being confident and making the thing. I think I have the experience teaching and creating to create something that truly takes education a step further.

This Phonics topic, though, was surely one of the thoughest challenges in a while. I think I have exactly the right level, right amount of challenge, and right amount of usefulness to pre-readers now. I think my work here is unique and valuable enough to warrant its existence and price tag.

But I might be wrong—users of my work are always free to let me know their feedback.

Well, as I just explained, the new plan was to make two resources: 15 posters in the first one, 15 posters in the last one. A bunch of extra exercises and activities would be added to the second resource. Because, well, you can’t really test if you know all the phonemes if you haven’t actually seen all the phonemes yet!

However … my computer is old and bad and slow. It was lagging so much, it crashed a few times, and I knew it just wasn’t possible to add the exercises to that file anymore. I decided to split them off, and a funny thing happens as soon as you reprogram your mind to say “this will be a new document/separate project”. That fresh new document suddenly yields more ideas and makes you feel like you have to do more. Because it feels silly to add an extra PDF to that resource with just … 4 pages.

And so I spent far more time and effort on the exercises and activities about phonemes. It became a 12-page PDF—and the editing document also started lagging by the end ;) This was more than enough to publish it as a separate product, which is how the phoneme awareness topic ended up having 3 resources anyway. But that third resource teaches nothing—it’s really just testing. Exercises and activities/games. As such, I kept the old messaging that the phonemes were split into two, because this third product was completely optional and just a sort of “final test if you want it”. (Which is also why I called it Phoneme Phinals, instead of the original name Phoneme Pheast.)

All in all, this meant my planning was delayed even further as way more time was put into this topic. But it was simply the right thing to do. The resources I ended up with are very strong, pretty, and complete. Much better than my original plan for phoneme awareness, much more effective and useful. It also taught me many lessons to take with me once I start creating the alphabet resources, because those will be roughly the same thing: split into multiple parts so I don’t have to teach 26 letters at once, which is always a bad idea. Thanks to the explosion of phoneme work, I at least know what to expect (in terms of time/resources/effort needed) going into Level 2 Language.

Conclusion

Finally, putting in so much work always has an extra side-effect: I end up with more ideas for the other factions. I initially only planned a single puzzle and a single Explorers story (at most a few pages long) about phonemes in general. By the time the Teachers were done, this was suddenly a large list of puzzles, games, and stories ;)

If there’s one thing I learned (again), it’s that I should not expect my vague initial ideas to stay the same. Or make any sense in terms of planning. Every time I dove into some topic, I always found more to explore, to teach, to take into account. I found more ways to teach the topic in ways that are hopefully clever, creative, and fun, and not being done by anyone else. Phonemes are just the latest example of that.

I hope this explains why I have three Phonemes resources in Level 1, for Pre-Readers. And then more Phonemes(-related) resources again in Level 2. They are different in a crucial way: the Level 1 gives you awareness of sounds, how to make them, how to manipulate them into words you know. Level 2 then attaches those sounds you’re already familiar with to letters of the alphabet (which you’re learning at the same time).

Or, in other words: triple the resources, more work for me ;)

I hope this was interesting to read. I’ll be creating the My First Stories resources now, which should finish all of Language Level 1!