A  consonant is a phoneme (speech sound) that is not a vowel AND is formed by obstructing the flow of air with the teeth, lips, or tongue. English has  25 consonant phonemes. Consonants are called “closed sounds” because the breath is closed off or restricted in some way by the mouth.  

Consonants are distinguished from each other by:

· PLACE OF ARTICULATION: whether the sound is produced from the front, middle, or back of the mouth

· MANNER OF ARTICULATION: how the lips, teeth, and tongue work together to direct sound through the throat and nose

Below are the 25 consonant sounds organized by type of sound according to Dr. Louisa Moats in her book Speech to Print:

 

STOPS: Made with one burst of air (these can be difficult to say without adding “uh” at the end, so be super careful with these)

· Unvoiced: /p/ /t/ /k/

· Voiced: /b/ /d/ /g/

 FRICATIVES (also called CONTINUANTS): Air goes on until you run out of breath (lots of air flow)

· Unvoiced: /f/ /th/ /s/ /sh/ /h/

· Voiced: /v/ /th/ /z/ /zh/

o   *The /zh/ sound is rarely taught in schools because it has no consistent spelling in English…it can be spelled su (treasure), si (vision), zu (azure), or g (genre).

 AFFRICATIVES: Sometimes called “chopped fricatives" because they combine features of stops and fricatives—they begin as a STOP and end as a FRICATIVE. 

· Unvoiced: /ch/

· Voiced: /j/

 NASALS: Produced by driving air through the nose (you can't say these sounds with a pinched nose…just try it & see what happens!)

· /m/ /n/ /ng/

 GLIDES: Always followed by a vowel-the consonant “glides” right into the vowel sound

· /w/ /wh/ /y/

 LIQUIDS: These can be very problematic for reading & spelling because they don't stay still in a word—they're slippery and seem to float. The pronunciation changes somewhat depending on the letters around them & they often distort the vowel that come before them.

· /l/ /r/
 

     Another group of phonemes include vowels. A vowel is a phoneme (speech sound) that is an open phoneme, meaning the airflow is unobstructed when we say the sound.

 

A few fun facts about vowels:

· Vowels are at the heart of English because every syllable must have a vowel sound.

· Vowels make it possible to carry a song's tune…it would be impossible to sing a song of only consonants!

· Vowels give students the most trouble when learning to read and write.

 

English has 15 vowel phonemes + 3 r-controlled vowels (also called “Bossy R) + an empty vowel sound called schwa. That adds up to 19 sounds. Add that to the 25 consonant sounds and the total is 44, which is the total number of speech sounds in English.

  Vowel sounds can be organized into what's called a  Vowel Valley.

 
You may have heard about this recently on Instagram or Pinterest. It's becoming a very popular way to organize vowel sounds in kindergarten-2nd grade classrooms. To watch a video explanation of the Vowel Valley, check out  this video.
SCHWA
*Schwa means “empty” in Hebrew, which is fitting since schwa is an empty vowel sound that can sound like /u/ or /i/ but can be spelled with A, E, I, O, or U (like the word “ago”).
 *Schwa is SO tricky for kids and can make it really difficult to read and spell.

*You can see all speech sounds in this printable chart and watch them being spoken correctly in this video.