Why Phonemic Awareness Must Be Taught
While phonics is the ability to say the sound associated with a letter, phonemic awareness is simply the skill of knowing where a sound is located in the word. For example, is the "duh" sound heard at the beginning or end of the word "dog"? In other words, phonemic awareness skills can be practiced without any knowledge of phonics.
How Mr. Ed. Teaches Phonemic Awareness
When you begin the phonemic awareness activity below, our Mr. Ed cartoon character will say the word "fox." He will then ask the student to click the letter that makes the first sound in the word "fox." To avoid making this a phonics lesson, we included helper triangles on each beginning, middle, and ending sound buttons. Students can then click the triangles to hear that sound. When they find one that matches, they simply click that button. You can see the power of this lesson in that it also helps students learn phonics by visually associating a letter with the triangle sound button.


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Watch Mr. Ed Tutor & Friends teach your student(s) everything they need to know when beginning the learning-to-read process. This program was designed by professional tutor "Richard Pressinger" and will result in rapid learning of critical skills in phonemic awareness, phonics and letter names.

Intensive teaching of each sound and letter in these words results in dramatically improved rate of learning. Click a correct answer and a cartoon character gives students a pat-on-the-back. Wrong answers result in detailed teaching of the correct answer - in other words, a powerful full-time tutor!

Questions please call (919) 908-1542 or email at www.readingkey.com/contact

The idea behind the "Mr. Ed" concept was to provide students with a computer based learning activity that not only teaches critical early elementary reading skills, but also provides detailed instruction at the exact moment a mistake is made by the student. In other words, we are now providing you with a full-time professional tutor. The end result is that the student will be able to learn critical reading skills at a dramatically faster rate.

STEP 1: Learn Phonemic Awareness
STEP 2: Learn Letter Names & Sounds
STEP 3: Learn Common Vocabulary Words
Simply put, these are the 3 steps you need to follow to enable your child to learn at the maximum pace. Here, your student will be taught the letter names and sounds used in the 20 CVC words above. CVC means Consonant-Vowel-Consonant and are simply 3 letter words that contain a short vowel sound in the middle. There are five short vowel sounds in the English language and must be learned in order to read and spell correctly. Short vowel sounds can "tricky" to learn - but when achieved, learning will advance rapidly.

The intent of this exercise is to allow your student to engage in a powerful phonemic awareness activity without any intervention on your part. In other words, we wanted to create a practice exercise in phonemic awareness that can be done by a child who has never been exposed to letters or sounds before. For example, even non-english speaking students can participate in this important exercise since the only skilll needed is matching the sounds that can be heard over and over by simply clicking the blue triangles on the buttons.

Mr. Ed begins by definining and saying the first picture word - "fox." The student is then asked to click the letter that makes the first sound in the word. While this does assume the student have some basic knowledge of the alphabet letters and sounds they make, there is a "back-up" plan in case this skill is not yet mastered. Any time the student does not know a letter sound, they simply click a small blue triangle on the corner of the letter button. This immediately plays a brief audio saying the letter name and sound, thereby giving the student the information needed to pick the correct - first, middle, or last sound in the word. Note how we only give two choices for each letter/sound. This is a very effective learning strategy because it greatly increases success through a technique known as "recognition memory." For example, it is much easier to "remember" the correct letter answer when given two choices, rather than being asked for the answer with no clues. Unlike other computer based programs that tell the student if the word is spelled right or wrong after finishing all 3 letters (or at the end of the entire exercise), Mr. Ed jumps in at that exact moment a mistake is made and immediately provides 20 seconds of detailed instruction on what answer should have been selected and why. In other words - you now have a powerful private tutor helping your child every step of the way! Click BEGIN above to begin the program.