It was a crisp fall day, with sunlight streaming through the golden oak leaves like stained glass.
The playground hummed with jump ropes slapping the pavement and the rhymes that went with them. The four-square courts echoed with bouncing balls and laughter. Every swing was occupied, children soaring high into the air.
In one corner of the playground, sitting alone, was a second grader I recognized from my earlier days as a parent volunteer.
With her dark hair in braids, Betsy hid her face in her knees. She wasn’t crying, but everything about her seemed dejected.
I walked over and sat beside her, positioning myself so I could still observe the playground.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Betsy answered.
“Well,” I said, “on a beautiful day like today, when you aren’t out playing, I think something is going on.”
She looked up at me, her blue eyes brimming with sadness.
“Everyone thinks I’m stupid.”
“Betsy, that’s not true. I don’t think you’re stupid. Why would you say that?”
Betsy took a deep breath and seemed to shiver. “Because I’m the only one in my class who can’t read. I’m stupid.”
“Well, it looks like I’m sitting in exactly the right place, Betsy. Do you know why? Because I know how to teach kids to read.”
Betsy looked at me as though I had little green antennae growing out of my head.
“When I try to read, it just looks like soup—alphabet soup. I just can’t figure it out!”
“Betsy, here’s what I’ve discovered when I work with people who can’t read: usually, no one has actually taught them how.”
Betsy perked up a little. “How do you figure it out?”
I smiled. “It’s pretty easy. We can do it right here if you’ll find me a stick so I can write in the dirt.”
Betsy returned with a foot-long twig and handed it to me. I used it to make a “b” in the dirt.
“Betsy, what sound does this letter tell you to make?”
“That’s easy! ‘Buh,’ like in Betsy!”
We went through the letters in her name and discovered that she didn’t know the letter “y” could represent more than one sound.
“See, Betsy? It’s easy. The first step in learning to read is understanding that letters represent sounds, and then figuring out which sounds each letter asks us to make.”
“What confuses many people is that the letter names—the ABCs—don’t actually help us know what sound to make. Let’s go through all 26 letters and practice their sounds.”
As Betsy and I worked through the alphabet, I realized she could connect only 14 letters to their sounds.
“We did it! We figured it out! You need to learn all your letter sounds, and you already know more than half of them. I’ll ask your teacher if we can find some time to work together on the rest.”
After recess, I walked Betsy back to her classroom, and that day we began systematically working through the alphabet, connecting each letter to its sound. We met for ten minutes a day to practice her reading skills.
By Christmas break, Betsy was reading aloud to me above grade level.
At our last session, I handed her a can of alphabet soup.
“Now reading isn’t like alphabet soup anymore. You’ve learned how to read.”
Betsy grinned. “Yes—now I know how to make alphabet soup.”
Here’s a letter sound checklist I used in the classroom.
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