Let’s Turn Those Sounds Into Words Once you teach students the sounds and sound combinations,, all 67 of them, you can then teach them to blend the sounds and sound combinations into words. Despite the fact that 650 of the most commonly used English words are phonetically regular and can be sounded out, there are some dangers here. You must always teach every sound or sound combination before you ever use it in a word. Every word in every story must be taught as a word before it is added to the story. You never force the child to have to rely on guessing or pictures or context, but on accurate fluent decoding skills. Only a very few commercially available reading programs rely on these strategies to produce good readers. Such programs might work for smart kids who can learn from sloppy instructional design, but such programs are anathema to kids at risk of school failure as we have consistently seen for decades.
