If you’ve been relying on a word wall and still seeing your students struggle with decoding, you’re not alone. For years, I used word walls faithfully—only to find that they weren’t moving the needle for many of my readers. That all changed when I discovered sound walls.

Rooted in the Science of Reading, sound walls are more than just a visual. They’re a bridge between speech and print, giving students a deeper understanding of how our language works.

In this post, I’ll walk you through what a sound wall is, how to set one up, and how you can use it to build phoneme-grapheme connections in powerful, practical ways.

What exactly is a Sound Wall?

A sound wall is a visual representation of the 44 phonemes (individual sounds) in Standard American English. It helps students develop a clearer understanding of how and where sounds are formed in the mouth.

It helps students build phoneme-grapheme connections—the link between the sounds in spoken words and the letters or letter combinations that represent them in print.

Instead of being organized alphabetically like a word wall, a sound wall is organized into two sections:

• Consonant Chart – showing where and how consonant phonemes are made in the mouth
• Vowel Valley – displaying vowel phonemes based on tongue placement and lip rounding or spreading

Each phoneme is paired with a corresponding mouth picture, allowing students to visualize how the sound is produced. This is especially helpful for students who are just learning to match spoken language to written text.

Sound walls empower students by making their speech visible, giving them a foundation for decoding, spelling, and reading with confidence.

How Sound Walls Align with the Science of Reading

If you’re following the Science of Reading, a sound wall fits right into the word recognition strand of Scarborough’s Reading Rope. According to the Simple View of Reading, skilled reading is made up of two critical components: language comprehension and word recognition. Sound walls directly support the latter.

Here’s how:

• They make speech-to-print connections explicit
• They reinforce phonemic awareness and phonics
• They support orthographic mapping, which helps students store words permanently in memory

Students who haven’t yet mastered word recognition are still in the speech-to-print phase. A sound wall helps bridge that gap by giving them tools to decode unfamiliar words using sound knowledge—not guesswork or memorization.

Components of a Sound Wall

Consonant Phonemes

The consonant chart on a sound wall displays the 25 consonant phonemes in the English language. These sounds are made when airflow is blocked by the tongue, lips, and teeth — so they’re considered “closed” sounds.

The chart is organized by:

• Place of articulation – where the sound is made (front, middle, or back of the mouth)
• Manner of articulation – how the sound is made (stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, glide, or liquid)
• Voicing – each consonant will be voiced or unvoiced

You’ll see the mouth pictures that show a pair of phonemes together: for example, /t/ and /d/, or /p/ and /b/. These mouth pictures are paired because both sounds are produced from the same place and manner of articulation. The difference is the first sound will be unvoiced, and the second sound will be voiced.

When teaching a new sound, I point to the picture and model the mouth movement, encouraging students to look in mirrors and feel the sound as they say it.

Vowel Phonemes

The vowel valley represents the 19 vowel phonemes and organizes them by where the tongue is in the mouth during production. It visually mirrors the shape of the mouth as the jaw drops—hence, the “valley.”

Key things to note:

• Vowels are open, voiced, and continuous.
• Vowels are categorized by height (high to low jaw position) and lip rounding.
• Diphthongs (/oi/, /ou/) and R-controlled vowels (/ar/, /or/, /er/) sit off to the side because they don’t fit neatly in the valley progression.

This layout helps students identify what makes the vowels different—a common challenge in early literacy. I find that explicitly teaching lip and tongue placement, as well as the dropping of the jaw, gives students something tangible to connect with each vowel sound.

How to Display a Sound Wall

Setting up a sound wall may feel daunting at first, but it does become manageable, and even fun, once you know what your options are.

Here are two approaches that you can use to set up your sound wall:

Build the Sound Wall as you go

Introduce and post each phoneme as you teach it. If you choose to use this approach, be mindful of how much space you will actually need once the entire vowel valley and consonant chart are put into place!

Create the Sound Wall, then Unlock the Phonemes

Create the entire sound wall at the start of the year, but use “locks” (covers) to hide sounds that haven’t been introduced yet. This keeps the display from becoming overwhelming.

Tips for Setup:

Adjust the sizing for wall space, or use a portable sound wall if your space is limited.

Start your vowel valley with the short /ŏ/ sound at the bottom, then build upward symmetrically.

Place headers for place and manner of articulation on your consonant chart first, then arrange the phonemes accordingly.

How can you use a sound wall in your classroom?

Sound walls can be used as scaffolding when needed. It gives educators insight into how their students are processing language by examining which phonemes come easiest for each individual learner.

By using a sound wall in the classroom, educators can provide their students with a valuable resource for understanding how sounds and letters work together to create spoken words.

Once I fully understood the sound wall, I began to implement it into my classroom. I posted the entire thing, and covered it up with the locks.

Here’s how I use it:

Daily Routine Integration

• Students refer to the sound wall during writing and spelling
• We include it during small group to introduce or review sounds
• Small groups use consonant and vowel phoneme cards to target specific sounds

Want a Done-for-You Sound Wall?

Ready to try it out in your classroom? My Sound Wall with Mouth Pictures includes everything you need to get started:

• Real articulation images
• Vowel valley and consonant chart
• Locks to cover phonemes until they are introduced
• Mini phoneme-grapheme cards for easy practice
• A cheat sheet for articulation terms (perfect for teacher reference!)
• Projectable slides to teach place and manner of articulation
• Practice pages to reinforce phoneme-grapheme connections

Even my struggling readers have made significant gains using these tools, because they can see, hear, and feel each sound.

Whether you’re just getting started with sound walls or want to make your current one work a little harder for you, this resource was made with you in mind. When we give our students the tools to see and hear the sounds they’re learning, it all starts to click. Little changes like this can make a big difference—and you’ve got everything you need to make it happen.

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