Here is a curriculum for school children. These are simple and amusing facts everyone should know, but they also serve as the first building block for reading that makes everything later easier and faster, and built an common sense unlike standard English spelling
What makes it fun and fast is Articulation Awareness that anyone can learn in a few minutes. Phomenic Awareness comes so easily after just a bit of Articulation Awareness, especially if it can save so much time learning to read.
And coolest of all is that basic science sneaks in too, in a fun way.
Shouldn’t every human know how they make the sounds of their language?
Put a piece of paper close to your lips and say the word POP. The paper pops! So we now know that pronunciation depends on air flowing from the lungs out of the mouth.
Now touch your lips lightly (or use a mirror) and say POP again. We just saw that the P sound is made with your lips. Lesson two is simply that speech is made out of flowing air just like you use pots, pans, and a stove to make a cake. We call the speech tools used to make speech sounds articulators.
Go ahead and say the word FIFE and you will see the lower teeth are used in the F sound along with the upper lip. You can guess why scientists refer to bilabial and labio-dental articulation.
Now alternate saying the words tea and key several times. Do it again as you ask yourself if they are using the same part of the tongue? You will feel a difference.
Next use a mirror to look inside your mouth. Lift your tongute a bit. You will see a tongue tip in front but the tongue goes all the way back toward the throat, so there is a front and back to the tongue. Now say tea and key several times again and you will be aware that tea uses the tongue tip and key uses the tongue back. The tongue is an important articulator and both the tip and back are used.
So far we have tried consonants. These are sounds thatgenerally either have quick closing of the air flow, or bring the lower articulator so close to the uppper one that air hissing or friction is produced. These consonants can be called stops or fricatives. Alternate saying the words patting and passing a few times until you can feel the air closed off in patting, but forced through a small hole in passing to produce friction.
Two other types of consonants redirect the air. Say Anna a few times while pinching your nose until you can feel that for nasal sounds the mouth is closed off with the air redirected through the nose. Yes, there is a gate far back on the roof of your mouth to do this. These are the nasal consonantts.
Next put a finger on your cheek and whisper the word light very loud with a lot of air. You will feel the cheek bulge a little bit because the air is closed off in the center of the mouth and redirected out the sides. This is the lateral L sound.
Yes, we use articulator tools to make consonants: stops, fricatives, nasals and laterals.
But we also make sounds with the air passage open. These are the vowels. Say hee hee and hah hah a few times and you will feel that no articulators are touching. Free flow of air make you wonder why the vowels sound so different.
Just try this. Touch the bottom of your jaw lightly whil you say the words see and saw altnernately a few times. You must feel the jaw go up and down. You just learned that some vowels are more open than the more closed ones. For see the tongh is high in th emouth while it is lowered for saw. It is quite scientific to speak of high and low vowels, more closed and more open.
But that is not all. Now alternate the words feed and food back and forth a few times. Do it slowly. You will discover that for see the tongh is in the front of the mouth while saw has the tongue pulled to the back. This shows that there are front and back vowels.
If you wonder why this should make a difference you are raising a question of physics. We won’t go into it here except to think of a trombone. Imagine trombone’s different notes as the slide change position. The law of physics is that a sound is changed or shaped by the shape of the passage it travel through. This is a resonating chamber.
You now