The CAPIT Sound Challenge

Students learn to Crack the Alphabetic Code

Free to Schools, Districts, and State DOE.

Students across the country compete to crack the alphabetic code and learn all the sounds (phonemes) of the English Language and their basic spelling patterns. The CAPIT Sound Challenge will ensure that all students master the building blocks necessary for reading success in an engaging competition. Teachers also compete against other teachers from across the country.

The CAPIT Sound Challenge is part of the Capit Learning family of resources, which includes a Pre-K Literacy Curriculum, a PK-2 Phonics Curriculum, Professional Learning, a Multisensory Kit™ Classroom Kit, and a Movable Alphabet Box.
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Celebrate Your Students’ Accomplishment and see them on our Live Leaderboard

Proud Teacher

Proud Teacher

Proud Champion

T-shirts and Certificate

The CAPIT Sound Challenge is the most addicting phonics activity I have ever seen. My students love it, and they are learning their letters and sounds at an incredible pace. Thank you CAPIT!

—Sara Wesley, Kindergarten Teacher, San Antonio, Texas

Teachers

Create your class, invite your students, and let the competition begin. You will be amazed at how quickly they learn the letters and their sounds. Please send the CAPIT Sound Challenge home so your students can compete with their parents and siblings.

District Admins

Run a personalized district-wide competition promoting foundational skills—at no cost. Classes across your district compete; each month, the winning class receives certificates and recognition on your district’s personalized leaderboard.

What Makes the CAPIT Sound Challenge Unique?

The CAPIT Sound Challenge helps students master letter sounds quickly and enjoyably because we employ a science-based method known as Visual Mnemonics.

Research and experience indicate that Visual Mnemonics are an efficient and fun method of helping students remember the relationship between the sound of a letter and its visual representation. A Visual Mnemonic is like “cognitive super glue,” magically and quickly pairing together “Sounds” and “Spellings” to one another with a lasting bond.

CAPIT provides unique Visual Mnemonics for every letter in the English language. Our Visual Mnemonics LOOK and SOUND like the Lowercase and Uppercase letters. They function as visual aids, helping students associate the English letters with images they can visualize, store in their memory, and later easily recall. Our Visual Mnemonics were selected after careful and prolonged testing with diverse groups of students. Only the fittest mnemonics survived.

Here is what the National Reading Panel Report says about Visual Mnemonics (emphasis added):

The value of mnemonics for teaching letter-sound relations to kindergartners is supported by evidence. In a study by Ehri, Deffner, and Wilce (1984), children were shown letters drawn to assume the shape of a familiar object, for example, s drawn as a snake, h drawn as a house (with a chimney). Memory for the letter-sound relations was mediated by the name of the object. Children were taught to look at the letter, be reminded of the object, say its name, and isolate the first sound of the name to identify the sound (i.e., s snake -/s/). With practice they were able to look at the letters and promptly say their sounds. Children who were taught letters in this way learned them better than children who were taught letters by rehearsing the relations with pictures unrelated to the letter shapes (e.g., house drawn with a flat roof and no chimney) and also better than children who simply rehearsed the associations without any pictures…The task of learning the shapes and sounds of all the alphabet letters is difficult and time-consuming, particularly for children who come to school knowing none. The relations are arbitrary and meaningless. Techniques to speed up the learning process are valuable in helping kindergartners prepare for formal reading instruction. The motivational value of associating letters with interesting characters or hand motions and incorporating this into activities and games that are fun is important for promoting young children’s learning. If the task of teaching letters is stripped bare to one of memorizing letter shapes and sounds, children will become bored and easily distracted and will take much longer to learn the associations.

—National Reading Panel Report, 2-125

For further reading and a webinar on the use of Visual Mnemonics, CLICK HERE.

We Reinvented the Alphabet Song

The ABC Song—sung to a tune popularized by Mozart—is arguably the most recognizable in all English-speaking countries. However, this song only teaches the names of the letters. Although letter names are important, and teachers must teach them, letter names do not help students read or spell. For that, students must learn which phoneme corresponds with which letter.

We reimagined the ABC Song and created a song that teaches students the shape of each letter and its corresponding phoneme, preparing and enabling them to read and spell.

  • Knowledge of letter shapes and their corresponding sounds is essential for learning to read and write English and is one of the best predictors of later literacy achievement. Conversely, children lacking alphabet knowledge are more likely to experience reading difficulties. Currently, American children enter school with varying degrees of alphabet knowledge.

    (Sources: Ehri, 2015; Hulme, Bowyer-Crane, Carroll, Duff, & Snowling, 2012; Georgiou, Torppa, Manolitsis, Lyytinen, & Parrila, 2012; Lonigan, Schatschneider, Westberg, & The National Early Literacy Panel, 2008a; S´en´echal, LeFevre, Smith-Chant, & Colton, 2001; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998; Denton & West, 2002; Strang & Piasta, 2016; Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 2001; Piasta, Petscher, & Justice, 2012; Torppa, Poikkeus, Laakso, Eklund, & Lyytinen, 2006.)

    We launched the CAPIT Sound Challenge to address this pressing issue and serve as The Great Equalizer that ensures all students quickly gain this all-important foundational skill—and does so with joy and excitement!

    Furthermore, we believe that knowledge of letters and their corresponding sounds is a vaccine against all instructional approaches not rooted in phonics and the Science of Reading. A child who can automatically decode letters into speech sounds cannot transition to a whole-word reading approach or the three-cueing system. Once the phonics seed has taken root, it cannot be uprooted.

  • Letter names are important, but knowledge of letter names does not help students read or spell. Our Phoneme First approach is more efficient, effective, and equitable. CLICK HERE to learn more,

  • The CAPIT Sound Challenge introduces students to all 40+ sounds (phonemes) in the English language, including the consonant digraphs, vowel diphthongs, r-controlled vowels, and the dark-l. Don't hesitate to contact us to learn more about the CAPIT pedagogy. We love nerding out on this stuff.