Sound Counter: Building Literacy Foundational Skills

Sound Counter is designed to build student success on key foundational skills, Sound Counter is a creative approach to helping build these skills.  Students are presented with a word and asked to count the sounds.  For example, a student might be asked how many sounds are there in the word: read?

Students count the sounds by dragging the colorful sound makers up into the box and then hit the submit button when they’re done.  If the student picked the right number, the get positive feedback and the word is shown broken up into sound boxes to reinforce their count and to demonstrate how the letter combinations form the distinct sounds.

Sound Counter helps build some key foundational skills for learning to read such as phonemic awareness, phonological skills, and the alphabetic principle.  Basically, this is:

• The awareness that words are made up of distinct sounds (phonemic awareness).
• The skill to recognize the sounds used in English (phonological skills).
• The principles behind phonics such as sounds can be represented by a single letter or a variety of letter combinations (alphabetic principle)

The students who master these skills in the early grades have a solid foundation and track record in learning to read effectively, the students who do NOT master these skills tend to flounder in building literacy skills.

You can use SoundCounter to teach a phonics lesson on important phonics topics such as digraphs, consonant blends, and vowels.

One of the challenges in mastering these skills is that they are totally dependent on quality auditory input.  Prior to having reasonable cost easy-to-use educational materials such as VocabularySpellingCity’s Sound Counter, this auditory input was mostly provided by teachers which are costly. Sound Counter provides a new level of interactive easy access to practice these skills. Plus, designed to engage the students, they leverage the student’s curiosity and interest in using engaging tools to build skills.

The VocabularySpellingCity suite of early learning skill-building activities:

Read about some of the other games: Sound It Out,  Vocabulary Memory Match, and Which Letter Team?