Uploading Sound Story Videos

I have realized for some time that I need to provide audio recordings and videos for this program.  Many adults have never been exposed to a systematic phonics program.  They may find it difficult to work with the Sound City Reading materials if they have never developed the skills that they would be trying to teach.  Because a phonetic program is strongly based on the sounds in words and the letters and letter patterns that represent those sounds, it's important for teachers, parents, and students to be able to hear those sounds, and to hear how the sounds in words can be taken apart and put back together again.

I've been working for almost a year now with the Camtasia program to learn how to make screencasts for some of the Sound City Reading books.  I have had good luck with a number of test recordings, but there were always a few glitches that I didn't know how to correct.  Over the past two days I've studied my previous notes, a number of Camtasia video tutorials, and any information I could find online to try to answer the questions I still had.  Victory!  I can now put together a high resolution screen recording that I can share online through Vimeo.  

Unfortunately, my vocal cords are not cooperating!  I have recorded the first pages from A Sound Story About Audrey And Brad, and my voice quality is terrible​​. : ( Nevertheless, with apologies, I'm posting the videos.  At least parents and teachers can watch them and get an idea about how to pronounce the alphabet sounds and present the material.   Perhaps, at some point I can re-record the videos.

If you're not familiar with this sound story, it introduces speech sounds in a story.  Each speech sound is represented by a sound that occurs in the story.  Every sound is represented by a picture that could occur in real life.  As far as possible, the pictures are intuitively clear.  For example, some of the sounds include a growling dog, snow crunching under boots, blowing wind, and chains squeaking on a swing set.  Sounds made by people's voices are included: exclamations of surprise (oh!), pain (ow), and satisfaction (mmm).  

Students can have difficulty learning the alphabet letters and their sounds because they are purely symbolic.  There is nothing about the letter T that indicates what the sound for the letter might be.  However, if students are shown a picture of a ticking clock, the /t/ sounds seems reasonable and students are able to make a clear connection between the picture and the sound.  The goal of the sound story is for students to easily learn the sound for each picture, and then relate that sound to the capital and lower case letters that represent that sound.

To me, it can be very confusing for students to learn the alphabet letters because they are truly complicated.  There are capital and lower case forms for each letter.  Some of these look the same, and some look entirely different.  Yes they have the same names and sounds.  For some letters, such as b and d, the sounds are fairly obvious because they are pronounced as part of the letter name.  Other letters are completely disorienting.  The letter H (aich) represents a sound that is totally different from its name.  This is why, in the sound story, students start with the sound picture, and then relate it to the alphabet letter that represents that sound.

 On top of that, letters printed in various fonts can look quite different from the letters that students learn to print.  So I've included two sets of letters with every picture.  The first pair of letters is printed in a "san serif" font, without serifs.  The second set of letters is printed in a font with serifs, which are the small pointed lines that stick out from the basic letters.  I'm hopeful that explaining both types of letters from the very beginning will help students be less baffled but the whole process.

I spent some time a few months ago studying about the development of phonetic languages, just looking for information online.  I found it interesting that the Phoenicians, who adapted a few of the many Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols to create their alphabet, chose letters that were really very simplified  pictures from their everyday life.  Once you learned what object each picture represented, it was easy to remember the sound - it was just the first sound in the word.  Teachers commonly use "key words" to teach alphabet letters, as in a/apple, b/ball, and c/cat.  But the Phoenicians made it even easier because their letters were actually simplified pictures of the key word, making it easier for Phoenician children to learn the alphabet than children who are learning the English alphabet in modern times.  

I used key words to teach the alphabet for years.  Then I began teaching my five year old niece.  I had the alphabet cards on the walls in my living room that I had used for years in my classroom.  But b/ball didn't mean anything to her because she couldn't hear the /b/ sound at the beginning of ball as a separate sound unit.  She just heard the whole word "ball."  I wrote the sound story that I now use for her, writing a new section and drawing a new picture before she arrived for each lesson.  This approach changed everything for her.  She easily learned to recognize the alphabet letters and to remember their sounds after she had learned the sound pictures first.  I later went back to the classroom and used the sound story with groups of first graders for years, with good results.