DS started reception this year. He has begun learning letter sounds and writing and is bringing simple books home. His teacher comments weekly in his reading book and he seems to have grasped quite a few letter sounds, is blending (?) well and needs to work on his letter writing and CVCs (?). I am so pleased that he seems to be enjoying this process but I am a bit bewildered by it.
His teacher is running a phonics workshop this month but unfortunately I cannot attend as we are going to be on holiday (authorised by school).
I realise that I rather deserve this for having booked a term time holiday but I am really hoping that I can get up to speed somehow. I am so disappointed that I will miss the session as I had been really looking forward to finding out how I can best support his learning.
I learnt to read using phonics but to be honest I think that the saying ?a little knowledge is more dangerous than none? applies here!! For example, I use a different letter sound than the ones DS has been learning , so for ?m? he says a ?mmmmmm? sound, I say a ?muh? sound (am trying to retraining myself to mirror his sounds). I also haven't heard of some of the terms I have read in his reading book: blending, segmenting, cvc, tricky words??.
I have googled phonics but am finding the quantity of information overwhelming and I am not sure if there are several ways in which a phonics system could be followed?
I am concerned that if I get this wrong I will confuse him by being inconsistent with what he is learning at school. I don?t feel I can ask his teacher to help as really this is my own fault for going away during term time. I have asked another mum to collect me some handouts.
I would be very very grateful if anyone suggest a good way to ?teach myself? phonics. I would also love a teacher?s input as to how I can avoid being inconsistent with what he is learning at school. Should I ask his teacher which type of phonics they teach? (we have parents evening next week so I could ask her then).
Thank you if you have got this far.
P.S. I am hoping I won?t get flamed alive for booking this holiday- I realise now that I should have given it more thought.
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Reception Parent Really Needs Advice about Phonics
stickwithit · 01/11/2011 14:22
Hi,
I was in the same boat a coupld of years ago, although I'm obviously a bit older than you as I learned to reading courtesy of Janet and John!! 
There are some good resources available to help you, my fave was a book by Ruth Miskin linked to her Read Write Inc series which provides the basics for parents. Amazon sell it, I think it was about £4.99.
Blending is breaking the words into individual sounds then saying them back as a word - eg. c-a-t CVC is consonant, vowel, consonant so all the three letter words you can probably think of.
Hope this helps xx
Ok, firstly it sounds as though he is doing really well and that his teacher seems to have grasped where he's at nice and early. It's also great that you want to support him. 
Right, they now learn the mmmm sound rather than muh as it gives the sound purity and stops children hearing muh and thinking the sound is made up of a 'm' and an 'u'. Does that make sense? In the same way, 'p' will be pronounced almost as if he is spitting rather than 'pi'.
As for those terms, blending is putting more than one sound together. So putting the 3 sounds (or phonemes) c-a-t together to make cat.
-Segmenting is the opposite so knowing that cat is made up of the sounds c-a-t.
-cvc is consonant, vowel, consonant such as cat or dog. You may also come across the term, CCVC which is basically an extra consonant such as in flop or step.
-Tricky words are usually high frequency words which cannot be sounded out phonetically but which they may come across frequently even in simple stories. Words such as 'the' or 'said'. Some schemes/schools will teach children they should learn these by sight as whole words and others will encourage children to look for a phonetic pattern in such words.
Just to clarify, a phoneme isn't always just one letter. If a child is learning through synthetic phonics they will learn that there is 44 sounds rather than 26 letters and that sometimes two or more letters also make up one sound. Such as 'sh', 'ch' or vowel diagraphs like 'ai' as in rain or paint.
HTH
Try to keep your sounds clipped and pure - like your 'muh' example.
This helps with blending - mmm-aaa-ttt blend to make 'mat', but muh-aaa-tuh blend to make the word muhahtuh, which is nonsense.
So try to take the 'uh' sound off as much as you can (harder with some letters than others - b, for example. Saying them quickly is good advice from a previous poster).
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