A three-year-old will usually give you a proud, tuneful alphabet performance, hand gestures included. Then you ask what sound the letter M makes at the start of mummy, and you get a blank look.

That gap is normal, and it is where reading begins. You can help close it in the car.

1. The alphabet song is a list of names

Singing the alphabet teaches a sequence of twenty-six names: ay, bee, see, dee. That is real memory work, and it comes in handy later, for alphabetising and for spelling words out loud.

It does not help a child read the word cat, though, because the names of the letters are not the sounds in the word. Say see, ay, tee as fast as you like and you will get nowhere near the word cat.

Reading an alphabetic language means using a code: marks on a page stand for sounds in speech, and those sounds blend into words. To use the code, a child needs to know what sound each mark stands for. That is a different piece of knowledge from the letter’s name, and somebody has to show it to them.

2. Two skills, and your child needs both

Two things grow together here, and it helps to know which is which:

  • Hearing the sounds. Noticing that spoken words are made of smaller pieces: that sun begins with /s/, and that cat and cup start the same way. This lives entirely in the ear. A child can practise it in the dark with no letters in sight.
  • Knowing which shape says which sound. Knowing that the written shape s is the one that says /s/. This is where the ear meets the page.

Put the two together and a child can begin to decode: look at the letters, recall their sounds, blend them, and hear the word. Without either one, reading turns into guessing from pictures and first letters. That works for a while, and then the books stop having pictures.

A child who knows all twenty-six names but none of the sounds still has no way to read cat.

3. Say it short and crisp, never “buh”

One small habit makes a big difference, and most of us get it wrong at first. When you say the sound for b, try for a short /b/ rather than “buh”.

That extra uh on the end is called a schwa, and it gets in the way of blending. A child taught buh, a, tuh will blend exactly that, produce something like buhatuh, and quite reasonably decide that reading makes no sense. Say the clipped sounds /b/ /a/ /t/ instead and they slide together into bat.

Some sounds can be stretched and held: /mmmm/, /sssss/, /fffff/. Those are the kindest ones to start with, because you can hold them long enough for a child to hear where one sound ends and the next begins. Begin there rather than with A, and blending comes much sooner.

4. Where to start, and in what order

Alphabetical order makes a good song and a poor teaching order: the letters that build the first easy words are scattered across the alphabet, and two of the most useful, s and t, come near the end.

Most structured phonics programmes start instead with a small set of letters that combine into real words quickly, commonly s, a, t, p, i, n. With those six a child can already read sat, pin, tap, nip and pat.

5. What to do with the next ten minutes

You do not need a curriculum for any of this, just a few unhurried minutes here and there, and most of them can happen in the car.

  • Play I-spy with sounds instead of names. “I spy something beginning with /f/.” This is the ear-training half. It needs no letters and no screen.
  • Point out one letter at a time. The first letter of your child’s own name is usually the one they care about most, so start there.
  • Let them see you read. A child who has never watched an adult read for pleasure has to take it on trust that any of this leads anywhere.
  • Keep sharing books. Decoding gets a child into a word; vocabulary and knowing about the world are what give a sentence its meaning. Reading aloud together builds those, and that is the part a screen does worst.

6. Where an app helps, and where it doesn’t

A screen is good at one part of learning letters: patient repetition, as willing on the fortieth go as on the first. That is useful, and it happens to be the part adults find hardest to keep up.

It does the rest badly. It cannot notice that your child said /g/ for d twice today, or that they are tired, or that they only care about dinosaurs this week.

ABC Letter Meadow does the repeating. Tap a letter and you hear its sound first, from a native-speaking voice actor, then a word that begins with it, with a picture to match, as many times as your child likes. The name button on the same card plays the letter’s name, and a parent can switch on Letter names so the name follows the word whenever a letter is tapped. Its letters are laid out A to Z, the order children already know from the song. Nothing rewards speed and there are no streaks to keep up.

The listening and the correcting are still yours: I-spy, stretching /mmmm/, and blending /s/ /a/ /t/ into sat, out loud over dinner or at a red light, with a book at bedtime to give the letters somewhere to go.

So the next time your child belts out the alphabet in the back of the car, sing along. Then, at the next red light, ask what sound M makes, and enjoy the pause while they think about it.