Letter Sounds Abound Awareness Tour

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Letter Sounds Abound Awareness Tour is sponsored by Practice Readers Books
The Children’s Book Review.

Letter Sounds Abound

Written by Catherine S. Young & Illustrated by Victoria Gesner

Letter Sounds Abound is a friendly alphabet book that highlights big ideas about how written language works for preschool and kindergarten children. It focuses on the most common letter-sound relationships while helping children tune in to the fact that letters can make different sounds in different situations to avoid confusion for beginners. The rhyming text makes it fun for parents to read to their children time and again, while simple line drawings inspire imagination without competing for attention with text. Ages 3-6 | 48 Pages

Available on Amazon and Practice Readers Books.

Interview with Author, Catherine S. Young

Can you tell us what went into deciding to write about letters and sounds?

This is the book I told myself I would never write. There are so many alphabet books out there in the world already (how many parents can quote Dr. Seuss’s ABC’s by heart?). My focus was on filling the gap I saw in the decodable text space for varied and richly rewarding texts for beginning readers (decodable texts control word use so beginners can practice reading without encountering too many words with spelling patterns they have not yet learned).

As I lay the groundwork for these books, I started working on mnemonics (memory devices) for letter sounds and thinking about ways to weave in key concepts about print. All of a sudden, I stopped seeing the alphabet books I was reading to my own children in the same light; multiple letter-sound relationships are often introduced without distinction, and rarely are key concepts about print explained. Then I asked myself a simple question: “What if an alphabet book could go beyond supporting basic letter recognition?”

This was important in my mind because the principles of reading are constructed; there is no readily discoverable reason why, for example, the symbol ‘b’ makes the /b/ sound. Nor is it obvious to the non-reader that the direction of reading goes from left to right. As experienced readers, it’s easy to overlook key concepts that we learned long ago in introducing a complex skill set like reading to beginners. My goal with Letter Sounds Abound was to highlight the concepts that would set families up for success as they support their children’s early reading development.

An alphabet book alone is not enough to teach a child to read, but it can be a great tool for developing alphabetic knowledge over time. My sincere hope is that Letter Sounds Abound will be a fun book for parents to come back to time and time again as their children develop and deepen their alphabetic knowledge.

What was your favorite or least favorite part of writing this book?

Making up the vowel characters was a lot of fun. Probably the best part of the whole process though was the excited look on my kiddo’s faces when I started to get the illustrations back. The illustrations really brought the whole project to life, and my kids (of course) needed copies for themselves. 😊

One thing that I hoped to achieve, but did not manage to, was to highlight the shape of the mouth when you make a given sound. The vowel sounds can be especially tricky for kids to hear and produce. Paying attention to how they are articulated by your mouth can help. This is the reason why the actual letter symbol is used for the mouth of all the vowel characters in the book.

How long did it take you to write this book?

It’s hard to hammer down the amount of time exactly. It really came out of other writing I was doing at the time. Once I came up with the opening line, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Even with a simple concept of the alphabet, did you run into writer’s block at any point?

I worked through most of the major challenges early on in identifying the target words I wanted to use. I developed three different vocabulary themes, ultimately settling on the outdoor theme you find in Letter Sounds Abound because I thought it had the broadest appeal. From there, most of the challenges came from ensuring a good rhythm and flow to the book. The text for U, I, and Y was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the most challenging.

How did you celebrate when you finished writing the book?

Dinner out with the family!

How long have you been writing?

I’ve always been a hobby writer. Even in my other life as a project manager, it has been a significant undercurrent to my career, although this is my first foray into children’s literature.

Do you plan on writing another book? Can you share?

I’m in the process of finishing up the Advancing Vowels cross-curricular decodable series, which has quite a range of titles within it. When my daughter started school (mid-pandemic), I was struck by how hard it was to find books that matched well with a child’s practice needs. This is especially the case at the earliest stages of reading and writing. Many leveled texts available for beginners require them to rely on the predictability of the text or the pictures to decipher what is written, but that is not how skilled reading occurs or is developed; more than anything it creates the illusion of reading.

One of the very first texts my daughter was sent home from school to read independently included words like ‘laugh.’ The au vowel combination? Letters g and h make the /f/ sound? At a stage when all the most common sounds of the letters of the alphabet had not been taught yet? That made me laugh. It was fundamentally a picture book experience with no storyline.

On the other hand, I used some decodable with my daughter and found that they were both very content-light (causing their appeal to wear off quickly) and offered limited selection for spaced and varied practice with target skills (typically one text per target letter-sound relationship or set of letter-sound relationships).

Being let in on the secret of written language is exciting, and realizing that you can learn from text is magical. I wanted to write books that would give kids many different opportunities to experience this achievement as early as possible. And above all, I wanted to give parents more options to enjoy these exciting literacy experiences with their children!

What advice would you give an author just starting their career?

I’ll magnify a quote from Toni Morrison, which I think is the best advice I’ve ever heard on the topic: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”