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If you granted us two wishes we would first ask for your understanding of VAS principles. But secondly we would want you to understand the importance of avoiding confusion between letter names and sounds.
Why are name/sound confusions so important? Well firstly because the confusions are so simple to avoid and secondly because, once established, name/sound confusions are so difficult to remediate.
Part of the problem may be that the NAME of a letter is much easier to learn than the short SOUND simply because letter names linger. The name 'O' (as in 'oat') for example lingers longer than the short 'o' (as in 'cot'). That gives the brain more time to absorb/pay attention/memorise the name whilst the short sound may be masked by the sounds of other letters in the word.
But a major cause of name/sound confusions is that we, the parents and teachers, teach NAMES first; we teach A-B-C (ay-bee-see). These names then become the DOMINANT memory and once established remain dominant. As a result, if we later try to teach the sounds of letters, the child’s instinct is to search for the SOUND in the dominant memory, where we have stored its NAME.
Take for example a child who has established letter names first rather than letter sounds. If we then ask that child what is the sound of the letter 'u' . They search in their dominant memory (where they have stored the name of 'u' instead of its sound) and find the name 'yoo'. They then use the first part of the name 'yoo' to incorrectly deduce that the sound must be 'y' ('yuh').
Keep in mind the fact that many infants have a low VAS and that word-guessing strategies are doomed to fail with such infants. For them it therefore becomes vital for, if they also have poor phonic skills they have no reliable means of reading. They therefore must be given phonic skills from the outset, and they simply cannot manage that if they have confusions between names and sounds.
In the Prep. and Kindergarten years we often cannot accurately measure VAS levels. We therefore cannot determine in advance which of these infants are at risk. It therefore behoves us to initially teach letter sounds not names to EVERY infant.
For the high VAS child, establishing names often leads to problems with long words mid-way though primary school but to the low VAS child, teaching names first is a recipe for disaster right across the literacy board for they remain virtually non-readers for a long period.
The urgency of this teaching challenge becomes apparent when we look at the statistics on the poor readers for there we find that, during the critical period between the ages of six and eight years of age, one failing child in three displayed name/sound confusions with the consequent undermining of their phonic skills.
Given that during the same period over 50% of the poor readers had insufficient VAS for whole word processing, we don’t have to look far for reasons why these are failing children. They fail because they lack the VAS memory development for whole word processing and we can’t do a thing about that. But they also fail because we haven’t given them phonic skills either and we sure as hell could have done something about that...and didn’t.

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(Jean)
She called herself 'Little Jane' and me 'Big Jean' which, given the diet I am trying, is not my favourite epithet. I suspect that she will always think of herself as 'little' and will probably always be dominated and compliant.
At the bottom of 'Little Jane's' problems was longstanding confusion between names and sounds and this undermined every aspect of both reading and spelling.

Unfortunately remediating these embedded name/sound confusions is often hard-slog stuff. With 'Little Jane' it took months, during which time she constantly used tears as a means of avoiding work.

There were many occasions when I cursed her parents, Sesame Street and her first teachers for having taught this child letter names before letter sounds!

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We find confusions between names and sounds to be one of the most common causes of reading errors. It is important simply because it usually undermines a child’s capacity to blend letter sounds together and that then means that the higher order phonic skills also remain unreliable, and if children's phonic skills are unreliable don't be surprised if they revert to inaccurate guessing instead.
We also find that remediation of name/sound confusions is a surprisingly difficult task even in the hands of a specialist tutor. We therefore must PREVENT these problems before they start.
Happily most of these name/sound problems could be decimated almost overnight simply by writing a simple letter to parents and teachers in feeder schools.
Here is a sample letter for distribution to all feeder schools and to parents of children less than six years of age. Within a year of circulating the letter you should find that the teaching of phonics in the infant years becomes dramatically more effective...

Click below for a sample letter to the parent or teacher.
Sample letter

Highlight it, choose 'copy' from the Edit menu -
Open Word or another word processing programme ;
Active your tying curser - chose Edit / paste -
Change the relevant information - print & sign

How easy was that?