The Letter D
Teaching The Letter D
To say the letter D properly, teach your child to have the tip of their tongue pressed against the top of their mouth, just behind the very front tooth. Then they need to push the air out by separating the upper mouth and the tongue. Once the letter D has been spoken, their tongue should touch their upper mouth.
Some familiar words starting with D that your child should know are:
Dad
Dog
Dig
Duck
Dinner
Day
Teaching the letter D to preschoolers needs to be done on a consistent basis, and a good deal of patience is required. Reading to your toddler every day is a good place to start. Letter D books are available everywhere, and you can either buy them at stores or borrow them from the library. Choose books with lots of pictures and nursery rhymes if possible.
Maybe your child’s name has the letter D in it or even starts with D. In this case, you can show your child the letters in their name and teach them where D occurs and the sound that it makes. Family members or other people that are familiar to your child may have names with the letter D, and you can use these if your child’s name does not have a D in it.
Think about other names that start with the letter D that your child may have heard before. These might include:
David
Daisy
Danny
Demi
Debbie
Dennis
Once your child is more confident with the letter D you can introduce more challenging names such as:
Danielle
Donald
Daphne
Darren
Darrell
Davina
Always Have Fun Teaching Letter D
The more fun that you can make your teaching of the letter D the more that your child will be willing to participate. You can use letter D worksheets to help here. Choose worksheets that have pictures on them so it makes it more interesting for your child. There are other fun letter D activities that you can do, and you will find these below.
It will be fairly easy for you to find a letter D video and a letter D song. Using these letter D videos and letter D songs will be great fun for your toddler. With the song you can learn it and sing it together. Your child will be very excited about singing this song with you. There is a great example of a letter D song in a video below.
Watching videos about the letter D and singing songs together will be a wonderful experience for your child, and one that they are unlikely to forget. It is very possible that they will want to do this a lot, so be prepared to watch the same videos and sing the same songs over and over.
What Are Other Fun Letter D Activities For Preschoolers?
Letter D Animals
It is highly likely that your child will like animals, so talking about animals with the letter D in them will be great fun. A good place to start is with animals that begin with the letter D. There are a few of these so start with the easiest ones first. Your toddler is sure to know dog and they might know dolphin, duck, deer and dragonfly. After these easier examples you can show them pictures of dung beetles, a dhole and a desert tortoise.
After you have shown your child animals starting with D, you can show them animals that have a D in their name. There are not a great number of these, so you will have to search around. Some examples are bird, lizard, ladybug, panda and a leopard. When showing pictures of any animals, make sure that the name is spelt clearly at the bottom so that your child can see the letter D.
Find Things In Your Home That Start With The Letter D
It should not be too much of a challenge to find objects that start with the letter D in your home. Your child should be familiar with a lot of these objects and can tell you what they are. Examples here would be door, dice, drum, dart, doll and dress.
Then there are other D words that your child will hear their parents and other members of the family speak. If they watch TV then there will be even more examples. Some of these could include drink, do, draw, dine, dot and drive or driving. For these show the action or pictures to reinforce the learning.
What about other words with the letter D in them? Well there are plenty of those around and as usual start with the easiest ones. Here you can use hand, band, sand, today, Wednesday, made, spade, hood and head.
As always, either show them real life examples (such as head and hand) or show them pictures that present the words clearly. Make sure that all the letters are displayed for the words, and ask your toddler to show you where the letter D is.
Use Pictures Of The Letter D To Aide Learning
Images of the letter in its big letter D format (capital letter D) and the small letter D format (lowercase letter D), should be shown to your child so they can understand the difference between them.
You can find these images of the letter D online or in specialist children’s books that are available in most stores. You can get your child to trace the letter and then learn to write the upper case and lower case versions of it.
They Need To Learn The Phonics Of Letter D
Phonics instruction teaches your child the various sounds that letters can make. These sounds are also known as phonemes, and as your child learns these phonemes they will improve their phonemic awareness which is very important. Below you will see how to teach the sound of letter D.
English Alphabet LETTER D SOUNDS:
D /d/:
The 4th letter in the alphabet is D and is another short sound letter and an unvoiced consonant that is produced by pushing a puff of air through the mouth. Many educators teach this letter as the “duh” sound but it is not correct…it’s simply /d/. A few of the other short sound consonants are B, C, G and K.
Examples:
DIP: /d/ /i/ /p/
DOG: /d/ /o/ /g/
DAD: /a/ /d/ /d/
Exercises for /d/
- Remember to print a piece of paper for the Letter D/d/
Note: Children often confuse the small d with the small b so make sure the two are not used during the same lesson - Also print a piece of paper with words for D:
DIG
DAY
DOOR
DESK
DEAL
DAD - Show your child the Letter on the index card or paper and repeat the letter sound several times: D
Note: Be sure to pronounce D as /d/ and NOT /duh/ other wise the child will pronounce D words as /duh/ /o/ /m/ /e/ instead of /d/ /o/ /m/ /e/ or /b/ /e /duh/ instead of /b/ /e/ /d/ - Many children have difficulty discerning the difference between the lower case /b/ and /d/. Our best advice is to take extra time working on those letters and sounds with your child whenever possible.
- Listen carefully as your child repeats the sound after you
- Ask your child if different words have the /d/ sound and wait to see the response. Always repeat the word using the letter sound to be sure your child knows the sound
- Continue to repeat other /d/ words such as DOOR, DID, DAY, MAD
- Finalize the lesson by asking your child to tell you the sound of the letters
It Is Easy To Teach Your Child To Read With A Proven Reading Program
The aim of teaching your child about the letter D and the other letters of the alphabet is to teach them how to read. A good reading program will use synthetic phonics to teach all of the phonemes of the different letters. This will develop your child’s phonemic awareness too.
There are a lot of reading programs out there but it is important to choose a proven one that uses the phonics instruction method. A very good program for this is Jim Yang’s Children Learning Reading. Jim taught his kids to read when they were just 2 years old and many other parents have had total success with his reading program. Find out all of the details here.
Please use the teaching guide in the next section so that you can teach your child all about the letter E.
