"W" doesn't say "Wuh"

I figured I should tell everybody before the kids come home and tell you for themselves! I've talked to a couple of reading experts and read a couple of books on teaching kids how to read and found out something startling. As the title of this post says, "W" doesn't say "wuh." *cue alarming music: buh buh buh bummmmmmm* In most cases W actually says "oo" as in Boo. It takes some getting used to but it makes sense the more and more I think about it.

In words like word or well or what or woah, the wuh sound is the combination of the 'oo' sound and the vowel that follows it. When the kids are learning to read, we need to break the letters down into their smallest phonemes to make it easier for them to "hear" in their mind. Just like we want them to say "p" instead of "puh" or "mm" instead of "muh" they need to say "oo" instead of "wuh" so they can blend the sounds together to create the words.

One of the books I read suggests that beginning reading is a mostly auditory skill...not a visual decoding that we use later. If they're trying to sound out a word like "mom" but they're not using the smallest phoneme, or sound chunk, they won't be able to decipher it. It will sound like muh-ah-muh (a 3 syllable non-word) instead of mm-ah-mm (a one syllable real word). The same holds true with the w. Wow can be either oo-ah-oo or wuh-ah-wuh....totally cool huh.

Now just wait till you find out what Y says! :-)