Most children are taught consonants by elimination: they are the letters left over once you have removed A, E, I, O and U. Twenty-one leftovers with nothing in common except not being something else.
They do have something in common, and it is far more useful than that. Your child can find it with a mirror in about two minutes.
A vowel is a sound where the air walks straight out of your mouth. Nothing blocks it.
A consonant is the opposite.
A consonant is a sound where something gets in the way.
That is genuinely all it is. Something in your mouth — your lips, your teeth or your tongue — interferes with the air on its way out. It either stops it completely or squeezes it through a narrow gap.
And because it happens in a specific place, your child can find that place with their own mouth.
Do these three with a mirror, one at a time. The question each time is: what is getting in the way?
Say /mmm/ and hold it. Look in the mirror. Your lips are shut. The air cannot get out of your mouth at all — it goes out of your nose instead.
Say /t/. Just that, quick and sharp. Your tongue jumps up behind your teeth and taps, then lets go.
Say /fff/ and hold it. Your top teeth are on your bottom lip, and the air has to squeeze through the gap. You can hear it hissing.
Three sounds, three different blockers: lips, tongue, teeth. Once a child has spotted that, they can go and check any consonant they like, and they usually want to.
Then go back and try a vowel again — just ahhh. Nothing in the way at all. The contrast is the lesson, and it is why this is worth doing right after the vowels.
This is called articulatory awareness — knowing what your mouth is doing when it makes a sound — and it is one of the more underrated tools for a struggling reader.
Here is why it helps. Sounds are invisible and they vanish instantly. A child who can only listen for them has one fragile channel, and if their hearing for speech sounds is the weak spot — which is exactly what dyslexia is — that channel is the one that fails.
But the mouth is not invisible. Your child can see it in a mirror and feel it from the inside. That is a second and third route to the same information.
It shows up most clearly in spelling. A child who is unsure between /f/ and /v/ can check: are my teeth on my lip? Yes, for both. Is my voice vibrating? That is the difference. Same for /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, /s/ and /z/ — each of those pairs is made in exactly the same place, and the only difference is whether the voice is switched on.
That is a checkable, physical answer to a question that otherwise comes down to “does it sound right,” which is precisely what a struggling reader cannot rely on.
Worth showing your child, because it explains something they will meet constantly.
A consonant on its own is a very small event. /b/ is one quick beat and then it is over. There is not much to hold on to.
Give it a vowel, though, and it becomes something you can really say. /b/ plus /a/ gives ba. Now it is a chunk, with a bit of length to it, and it feels like a piece of a word rather than a click.
This is the same fact from the vowels article seen from the other side. The consonants are the edges of a word. The vowel is the part that actually carries.
There is one habit worth guarding against here, and it causes more trouble than anything else on this page.
When you say a consonant on its own, do not let a small “uh” creep onto the end of it. /t/, not “tuh”. /b/, not “buh”. /k/, not “kuh”.
Nearly every adult does this, because these sounds are so short that they feel unfinished and we round them off without noticing. But a child who learns them that way will later try to blend “kuh-a-tuh” and never arrive at cat.
The fix is to catch the sound at the end of a word instead of trying to say it at the start. Say mat slowly and stop — that final tap is the whole of /t/, with no “uh” anywhere in it.
Your child does not need the word “blocked,” or any technical vocabulary at all. What they need is the felt difference: air free, or air stopped.
Nor do they need to know that /m/ and /n/ send the air out through the nose, or that some consonants are made with the voice on and some with it off. Those are things for you to know, because they make you a better guide, not things to teach.
And do not turn this into a sorting quiz. The aim is one idea — some sounds are open, some are blocked — discovered rather than tested.
None of this is reading. What it does is give a child a way of checking a sound that does not depend on hearing it clearly — which, for a child whose difficulty is precisely with hearing sounds clearly, is worth a great deal.
Where this fits:
← Do the vowels first — the contrast is the whole point: vowels, and why you can’t say a word without one.
→ Next: continue sounds and stop sounds, and why some words are much easier to sound out.
→ The “uh” problem in full: finding the first sound in a word.
↑ The whole picture: how reading actually gets built, from sound to print.
BrainSenses Learning publishes structured literacy materials for parents and educators of children with dyslexia, created by a Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT, LDT, M.Ed.). If you’d like to see how this foundation gets taught step by step, you can pick up a free sample lesson.
Moats, L. C. (2010). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers (2nd ed.). Paul H. Brookes.
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning About Print. MIT Press.
Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Wiley.
Lyon, G. R., Shaywitz, S. E., & Shaywitz, B. A. (2003). A definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 53(1), 1–14.