A few years back, I had a student in my class — bright, chatty, curious about everything — who could sing the alphabet song from start to finish without missing a beat. She'd belt it out with real confidence. Her parents were proud, and honestly, so was I.
Then one day I asked her to point to the letter that makes the sound at the start of her name.
She stared at me.
She knew every letter's name. She just didn't know what any of them did.
I've thought about that moment a lot since then, both as a teacher and now as a mum. Because I think it captures something really important that gets missed in a lot of early learning — at home and sometimes even in classrooms.
Knowing the name of a letter and knowing what that letter does are two completely different things. And the second one — knowing what a letter does — is what actually unlocks reading.
The alphabet song teaches memory. Not reading.
I want to be careful here because I'm not saying the ABC song is bad. It's not. It's a great memory tool and there's real value in children being able to sequence letters. But what the song teaches is a list of names. It teaches a child that this shape is called "bee," and this one is called "em," and this one is "ess."
What it does not teach — not even a little bit — is that the letter B makes a /b/ sound, or that M is the sound at the start of "mum" and "moon" and "mango."
That connection — the understanding that letters represent sounds, and that sounds build words — has a rather grand name in literacy education: the alphabetic principle. But honestly, you don't need to remember the term. What matters is understanding the idea: letters are not just shapes with names. They're clues to sounds. And sounds are what make words.
Here's where it gets a bit confusing (and it's not your child's fault)
Some letter names actually contain the sound they make, which is helpful. Think about it — the letter B is called "bee," and you can hear the /b/ sound right at the start of that name. Same with M ("em" — you can hear /m/), and S ("ess" — you can hear the hiss of /s/).
But then there are letters that give you absolutely nothing.
The letter H is called "aitch." Say it out loud. Aitch. There is no /h/ sound in that word at all. If you're a four-year-old trying to connect "aitch" to the sound at the start of "hat" and "home" and "happy," you're essentially working a puzzle with missing pieces.
W is even worse — it's called "double-u." That tells a child precisely nothing about the sound it makes.
So when children get muddled, when they seem to know their letters but can't connect them to sounds — it's not because they're behind or slow or not trying hard enough. It's because this specific link has never been explicitly made for them. And once you see that, it becomes a lot easier to know how to help.
What actually moves the needle
I'll be honest — this part doesn't require anything complicated. It doesn't require flashcards or apps or structured lessons. It mostly requires a shift in how you talk about letters with your child.
When you introduce a letter, always pair it with its sound and a word they know.
Not just "this is B." But: "This is B — it makes the /b/ sound. Like ball. Like baby. Like your name starts with /b/!" Say the sound out loud, short and clean — /b/, not "buh." (That little schwa sound at the end — the "uh" — is something to avoid where possible, because it sneaks into words in ways that confuse children later.)
Play sound games in everyday conversation.
You don't need to sit down at a table for this. While you're driving, while you're eating, while you're in the bath: "What sound does 'dog' start with? Can you think of another word that starts the same way?" These little games — they feel like nothing, but they're building something called phonemic awareness, which is one of the strongest predictors of reading success that researchers have found. It's the ability to hear the individual sounds inside words, and it is built through play and conversation long before a child ever holds a pencil.
Read aloud, and pause on sounds you notice.
This is my favourite one, partly because it fits into something you're hopefully already doing. When you're reading together, you can slip in sound observations naturally: "Snail — that starts with a /sss/ sound. Ssss. Can you hear it?" You don't need to do this on every page. Just here and there, when it fits. Books with rhyme and repetition are especially good for this — the patterns help little ears tune in to the sounds inside words without any effort at all.
"But we already know all the letters"
If your child already knows all 26 letter names, that's genuinely a solid foundation. You're not starting from scratch — you're adding a layer.
And actually, you don't have to tackle all 26 sounds at once. Start with the letters in your child's own name (they already have a personal connection to those), and then work outward from there. Some letters will click quickly. Others will need more time, more repetition, more words attached to them.
The vowels — A, E, I, O, U — are worth approaching gently because each of them makes more than one sound (think of the A in "ant" compared to the A in "ape"). You don't need to teach both sounds at once. Just start with the most common one and let the others come naturally through reading and exposure.
The trickier consonants (H, W, Y) are fine to leave until later. There's no rule that says you have to go in alphabetical order. In fact, going in alphabetical order is one of the least effective ways to teach letter sounds, because it groups nothing meaningfully together.
One thing I always tell parents
At some point in the process of learning to read, there's a moment — and I've seen it happen and it never stops being wonderful — where something clicks. Where a child looks at a word they've never seen before and they sound it out. Where the letters stop being shapes and start being a code they can actually crack.
That moment doesn't come from knowing the ABC song. It comes from all the quiet, small, repetitive work that happened before it. The reading aloud. The sound games. The patient "this letter says..." conversations. The books that made them fall in love with stories before they could read a single word independently.
You're building toward that moment right now, probably without even realising it. Keep going. It's working.
If you're looking for ways to support your child's early learning at home, I have printable activity packs for ages 3–6 in my Etsy shop — designed to be short, playful, and pressure-free. I also write children's books on Amazon focused on sight words and early reading, made for children who are just beginning to recognise words on a page. Links to both are on this site if you'd like to explore.