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Er, no. The point is that your ay is pretty useless if she's never going to need it.

I have been using this as a guide.

Excellent, Carla123. You can't go wrong with one of Debbie's charts. What she doesn't know about phonics and teaching phonics would go on the back of a postage stamp!

'aigh' seems to be missing - unless I am looking in the wroing place.

I suspect that 'aigh' is missing because it is not one of the common ways of spelling /ay/. The chart doesn't show every single letter/sound correspondence, just the most common ones.

However, if they have been taught good 'phonics', most children are quite happy to accept that it is a way of spelling the /ay/ sound when it is pointed out to them.

For the more rare correspondences this 'incidental' teaching is just fine.

I think that rather takes us back to what learnandsay was saying.

It not on that particular code chart, but it is on other PI code charts. 'Aigh' is taught as part unit 9 of PI.

So you agree that it's more useful for a child to incorrectly sound out

<s> <t> <r> <a> <ie> <t> that to be told <aigh> in this word spells the sound "ay"? Unbelievable!

than

I don't think it is a matter of either agreeing or disagreeing. Learnandsay is simply reporting what actually happened. Her DD managed to work it out from the limited information she already had. No doubt if she had been formally taught (and remembered) that aigh made and an ay sound, she could have used that, but don't forget she is only in the first term of reception.

also remember learnandsay has been teaching her daughter to read since she was two

OP, I am in exactly the same position with my reception DD. I have basically decided that we will do the synthetic phonics at home, using our own books- Songbirds and ORT phonics. We're also using the Reading Eggs website which is mostly SP with a few 'sight words'.

When she has sight words to learn, I explain the tricky phonemes and then get her to practise sounding it as normal. I also make connections with other words. So the school sent home 'he' I taught her that the 'e' makes 'ee' and showed her that it's the same in me, we etc. So she can sound out around 5 New words instead of having learned one by rote.

We do read the school books together as well, and we look at and talk about the pictures. But I make it clear that she is to read the words by sounding, not guessing. If she doesn't know a phoneme I might either: a) tell her the word b) tell her the phoneme and just move on or c) sit down and teach her the grapheme- phoneme correspondance. It depends how common the grapheme is and how tired she is.