The Letter B
The Letter B
The B sound is one of the very first sounds infants make. It’s part of a five-month-old’s natural babble and language play. In preschool, children begin to sing their ABCs and play alphabet games, linking the sound they know to the letter shape. One way that students learn to recognize and read words is through word families. These are groups of words that have the same ending letters and sounds but different beginning letters. Bat, cat, fat, hat, mat is a word family. This word family is made up of the very simplest type of word to read, the consonant-vowel-consonant combination. When students read new words in this word family they need only focus on the first letter to identify the new word. The second letter in the alphabet is a star in early reading word families. Bat, big, bog, but, and bet are all members of consonant-vowel-consonant word families that children learn when they are first learning to read. A lowercase B can be easy for young children to confuse when reading or writing. It takes some time for students to distinguish between a “b” and a “d” and even a “p”. Although this confusion can be a sign of a learning difference in older children, it’s very usual for young children who are learning to read and write to mix these letters up. In time, most children learn the correct orientation of these letters.
