Why to Sound Button
Sound buttoning is a key strategy for teaching children the relationship between letters and sounds. Often it is viewed as a skill for younger learners, but high-level sound buttoning can be helpful for much older children once we start building complex words. Good sound buttoning skills are particularly helpful for dyslexic learners who may fail to link letter patterns to sounds unless explicitly taught.
Sound Buttons are particularly good at making the directional relationships between letters clear. We teach children to read from left to right, but actually split digraphs, soft sounds and the effects of ‘r’ on vowels all word from right to left, backwards within a word with the later letter affecting the earlier sounds. By physically drawing the buttons from the back towards the front of the words we are highlighting this anomaly and making it explicit to learners.
Many letters in English words have multiple functions. For example, in the word ‘racing’, the ‘i’ is making the ‘a’ into a long vowel sound, it is ‘melting’ the ‘c’ into a /s/ sound and it is making the /i/ sound as part of the suffix ‘-ing’. By sound buttoning each of these functions we are making the multiple functions of individual graphemes explicit. We are providing visual cues to support decoding skills.
How to Sound Button
Single Letter-Sound Relationships
Each letter is marked by a dot or button. Children can be encouraged to ‘press’ each button as they sound a word out, and then run their finger under the word as they blend the sounds together.
Digraphs and Trigraphs
Where more than one letter makes a single sound its button is a line. This is for consonant or vowel digraphs or trigraphs.
Split Digraphs
Split digraphs are given an arc linking the two grapheme letters. When drawing the arc for a split digraph always draw it from the ‘e’ back towards the vowel. This explicitly teaches children that they need to read ahead. It also highlights that the effect works backwards- the last letter is ‘jumping backwards’ and making the earlier short vowel into a long vowel. This reduces confusion about which letter is ‘shouting’ its name.
Doubled Letters
Where a letter is doubled, because it is a ‘short vowel double’, a ‘padding double’ or had been doubled because of the addition of a suffix, then the letters are underlined together. This shows that the sound is heard only once.
Soft Sounds- C and G
When the ‘E’ is affecting the sound of the preceding ‘c’ or ‘g’ we say the E has dropped ‘magic dust’ and ‘melted’ the letter. The sound button goes above the letter indicating the letter is making its soft sound. This helps children to notice the relationship between the letters as they sound button them. It also allows children to demonstrate that they have noticed ‘soft sounds’ non-verbally which is useful for group and home work.
Final E with Soft Sounds- Half Jumps
Sometimes the ‘c’ or ‘g’ is affected by an ‘e’, ‘i’ or ‘y’ that isn’t part of a split digraph unit. We draw the arc from the letter to the soft sound. This is because it highlights that the effect is ‘backwards’, with a later letter affecting a letter that occured earlier in the word. .
The letter ‘e’, ‘i’ or ‘y’ will also have a sound button IF it is making a sound
Final E
Where the final E only exists because the preceding letter needs it, it is underlined along with that letter. This is because the ‘e’ is not making a sound so it doesn’t have a sound button. This also makes the relationship between the letters clear.
How to Sound Button Affixes
Sound buttons can be great for supporting learners who are exploring the morphology of complex words. They can support them to separate words into their prefix, base word and suffix(es). They are also helpful for exploring how base words join suffixes, especially when looking at adding vowel suffixes to words.
Prefixes or Suffixes
As prefixes and suffixes are learnt ‘chunks’ that are not individually sounded out we double underline these. This shows we are not using sounds to read or write these affixes. This is because the vowels in many prefixes and suffixes reduce to schwa and cannot be identified. Also, the pronunciation of many prefixes and suffixes changes depending on the base word. e.g. waited, zipped, smiled, return, rewind.
Complex Joins
Where a base word takes a vowel suffix we mark both the base word sound buttons and the vowel suffix.
This is one of the reasons that we arc over the top of the word rather than below. It allows room to show the dual function of letters within words.
Prefixes and Suffixes
Where a word has more than one suffix, or has a prefix and a suffix, both affixes will be double underlined. This helps children recognise the base or root word. It also makes the morphology of complex words clear.