Letter W

Teaching The Letter W

First you need to teach your toddler how to pronounce the letter W. Ask your child to make their lips narrow and close to each other. The lips shouldn’t be touching. The inside of their mouth should also be close together. Next tell them to move their lips and mouth further apart as they make the letter W sound.

These words that start with W may be familiar to your child:

Win

Was

When

Why

Who

What

Always be patient when you are teaching your child the letter W. It is probable that they will make some mistakes. A consistent approach will also be required. Reading to your toddler each day is recommended. There are specialist letter W books that you can buy online or at the store. Always choose books that have fun illustrations and nursery rhymes in them, as this will be more enjoyable for your child. It may be possible to find letter W books at your local library.

Does your toddler have W in their name? If this is the case, then use plastic letters to spell out their name and show them where the letter W is situated. If there is no W in their name, you can use other names that start with W. These could be characters from the TV that your child is aware of or family members. Whichever names you choose, be sure to spell out all of the letters for your toddler.

Here are some names starting with W that your child may know already:

Will

Walt

Wanda

Wendy

Wilma

Wilf

These are more difficult names that begin with W:

William

Winifred

Winona

Walter

Wayne

Willow

If You Make Teaching The Letter W Fun Your Child Will Want To Learn

Your child will want to learn a lot more if you have fun teaching letter W. Young children love to do fun things, and you will lose their attention if what you do is boring for them. There are some very entertaining letter W activities further on in this article. A good place to begin is with letter W worksheets. You can find these online. Choose worksheets that contain funny drawings to entertain your toddler.

What could be more fun for your child than learning and singing letter W songs? This will be even more fun for them if you do this together. There are a lot of W songs available. There are also good letter W videos that your child will enjoy watching. A lot of the letter W songs are provided in video format, and you can find a good example of this below.

The importance of learning and singing the songs together cannot be over stressed. You will form a very close bond with your child when you do this, so sing the letter W song together. Your child will really enjoy this, and will want to repeat this many times, so take the time out to do this. The same goes for watching videos together.

Some More Ideas For Fun Letter W Activities For Preschool Children

So far we have discussed using worksheets, learning and singing songs and watching videos. Other activities include:

Things That Start With W That You Can Find At Home

Tell your child that you are going to look for things that start with the letter W at home. If you are stuck for ideas here you can think about wafers, waffles, walls, wallet, watch, water, watermelon, wax, wheel, whistle, wig, window and wood. For every item that you find, you need to spell out all of the letters by writing them down, or using magnetic letters, so that your toddler can see that they all begin with W.

After this, you can think about other words starting with W that your child will have heard being spoken by members of the family or even on TV. Examples of these are what, when, who, why, which, wagon, wand, web, white, Wednesday, wings, wizard, world, we, will, was, well and wonder. You may need to use real life examples to explain the meanings of some words. If this is not possible then use pictures to do this. As always, spell out the words to your child.

What about words with W in them but not words that begin with W? There are a few of these so start off with some simple ones such as sweet, sweat, swim, awake, low, law, now, cow, sow, mow, paw, grow, show, swot and bow. If you need to explain the meanings of some words use pictures or real life examples. Spell out the words to your child so that they can see where the letter W fits in.

You can play this “W words” game outdoors too. When you are visiting restaurants or stores, look for words that start with the letter W or words with letter W in them. These should not be too difficult to find. Look for street signs as well, when you are in the car or travelling on the bus. Capture these words so that you can spell them out to your toddler when you return home.

Have Fun Finding Animals That Start With W

Your child will love looking for animals that begin with W. Kids like anything to do with animals. There are not too many of these animals, but you can think about a wallaby, walrus, wasp, water buffalo, weasel, whale, wildebeest, wolf, wolverine, wombat, woodpecker and worm. Show your child pictures of these animals, and write out their names so that they can see the letter W at the beginning.

Change this now to find animals that have the letter W in their names, but do not start with W. Some easy ones are hawk, kiwi, macaw, owl and newt. There are a few others that are not so familiar, such as the brown bear, bowerbird, cassowary, lechwe, peafowl and the snow leopard.  Use pictures of these animals and spell out their names, so that your child can be made aware of where the letter W is positioned.

Teach Them About Capital W

You can introduce the concept of capital and lower case letters by showing pictures of the letter W. Use pictures that show the big letter W (capital letter W) and the small letter W (lower case W) formats. Teach them the importance of capital letters, and use an example of where they are used. This could be the name of a country or city.

You can find pictures of letter W in both formats online. Print these out for your toddler. If you want to use your word processor to do this you can, but make the font really big as you will want to print this out. Ask your toddler to trace around the two formats so that they can become familiar with the differences.

Explain About The Phonics Of The Letter W

Tell your child that each letter of the alphabet has a unique sound. These sounds are known as phonemes. Also explain that the combination of certain letters produces unique sounds as well. Phonics instruction produces far more good readers than any other method of learning how to read. After your child has learned all of the different phonemes, they will find that reading got a whole lot easier. The next section explains more about the letter W sounds.

English Alphabet LETTER W SOUNDS:

W  /w/:

The 23rd letter in the alphabet is W and it is a voiced consonant. The letter sound for W is “Woo” /w/. To say the W sound the lips form a round shape ad the vocal cords vibrate. It sounds like “Win” or “Wash”

Digraphs are double letters that represent phonemes that cannot be pronounced by using a single character. The double “O” digraph for the “OO” /oo/ sound is very similar to the W “Woo” sound. The main difference is that the “OO” /oo/ sound comes from high within the mouth whereas the W /woo/ sound is deeper in the throat and more noticeable than the /oo/ sound.

Examples:

Digraph “OO”

FOOD: /f/ /oo/ /d/

LOOP: /l/ /oo/ /p/

vs.

Phoneme “W”

WIN: /w/ /i/ /n/

WISH: /w/ /i/ /sh/

Exercises for /u/

1. Print a piece of paper for the Letter W/woo/
2. Also print a piece of paper with the following words for W:
   WIN
   WET
   WILL
   WAVE

WORK
WATER

1. Show your child the Letter on the index card or paper and repeat the letter sound several times: W /woo/
2. Take time with your child to be sure the /w/ sound is pronounced correctly as /woo/
3. Listen carefully as your child repeats the sound after you
4. Ask your child if different words have the /w/ sound and wait to see the response. Always repeat the word using the letter sound to be sure your child knows the sound
5. Continue to repeat other short sound I words such as WEB, WALL, WEEK, WING
6. Now ask your child to replace a letter in one of the words to make a different word:
   1. Ask what sound would WIN be if you replace the /w/ with a /b/? [BIN]
   2. What if you replace the /v/ with an /n/ in the word VET? [NET]
   3. How will WAND sound if you remove the /w/? [AND]
   4. What sound will you make if you take away the /w/ in WALL? [ALL]
7. Finalize the lesson by asking your child what sound the W /woo/ makes

Get Help Teaching Your Child To Read Before School

It is a very good idea to teach your child how to read before they reach school age, as this offers them many advantages. You do not need to study teaching to do this. There are some excellent reading programs available that will teach a child of any age how to read quickly and efficiently. These programs will provide you with all of the instructions and materials required, to teach your child to read at home.

Not all of the reading programs are as good as they claim to be. Some of them are very expensive too. Always look for proof that a reading program works. A top reading program that has a ton of satisfied customers is Jim Yang’s Children Learning Reading. It is not expensive either, which is great news. This amazing program has been used to teach kids as young as 2 years old to read. Find out more about Children Learning Reading here.

Once you are ready, please move on to the next letter in this alphabet teaching series which is the letter X.