Help! Re-learning the phonics sounds and not letters

[TinkerTills]

Hi all. Anyone have experience of "undoing" the learning of the alphabet in favour of phonics? My parents have been teaching my daughter the old sounds and not the phonics sounds. I was also pretty clueless until I found myself watching alphablocks the other week...

The problem is my daughter is stubbornly sticking to the "fuh" instead of "fff" and "muh" instead of "mmm". In some ways i'm proud - she knows her letters - but how will the teacher deal with this? (DD starts school in Sept). Reception teachers must have some experience of undoing the well-intended mistakes of families!!

Help.

[breatheslowly]

Isn't that ok? Is 'fuh' not the phonic and 'eff' the old one? Won't most children be taught this by their parents if they learn it before school?

[Nagoo]

Yes, I did it with DD in the last few months.

I have the Jolly Phonics books, and we do the actions for the letters :) I used them with DS and he wanted to 'read' them loads, so they were worth it for me :)

Delete any apps on your phone or whatever that might have the 'ABC' on them, and try installing Hairy Letters or similar.

GooGirl still says the 'Fuh' is she see's the capital letter on occasion, but she's pretty reliable with lower case after only a few weeks :)

[Nagoo]

here

I think I got them a bit cheaper than that, so you could have a look about. I'd get the board ones as we used them a lot.

[Nagoo]

Oh yeah, not Fuh. Eff. whatevs

[BoysRule]

The reason we now say ffff instead of 'fuh' is because when you are blending to read, it is much harder to blend by saying 'fuh' as it doesn't make sense. E.g. if you are trying to blend f-i-sh, if you say fuh-i-sh it doesn't sound like fish. However, if you say fff-i-sh it sounds a lot more like fish.

She will learn all of the sounds from the beginning in reception - regardless of what she already knows. She will quickly pick up the correct way to say each sound, so I wouldn't worry. Just keep repeating it the correct way at home but don't discourage her. So when she says it wrong just repeat it back correctly and get her to do it without saying she is wrong.

IME it does take some time to 'unlearn' things but you do get there. The hardest thing to unlearn is letter formation!

[BoysRule]

However, if you mean she is has learnt the letter names instead of the letter sounds that's fine as she will need to know these at some point. Just say that the name is Eff and the sound it makes is ffff. A bit like a cat is called a cat and the sound it makes is miaow.

[TinkerTills]

Great Nagoo! Excatly the answer i was hoping for! breatheslowly - its so blooming complicated. After watching alphablocks and then checking out this website www.oxfordowl.co.uk/ I (think) I have learnt that

• "eff" is the letter for F.
  
• "fuh" is the sound i was taught at school in the 1980s (hence the helpful grandparents teaching DD)
  
• "fffff" is the phonic sound for the letter "F". Apparently teaching "fuh" makes it difficult to "blend" with other sounds.
  

I'll get cracking on with the phonics. Wish i'd known before - teaching the alphabet is such a natural thing to do with your child but now i feel like rather than helping her, i've/ we've hindered her instead. Parenting, eh?

[TinkerTills]

BoysRule - by my calculations I've got 11 sounds to work on and 4 weeks to do it! Not sure why its ok to say "guh" and "duh" but not "fuh", "cuh" etc... but it is what it is, and I don't want DD to be disadvantaged, or worse still back-chat the teacher (she's an argumentative little so-and so, 4 going on 14!!).

[breatheslowly]

Some of the actual phonic sounds are quite hard to say as they don't have any vowels in them so you can't voice them. Ssss and zzzz are ok, but I struggle to make a fff sound.

[Panzee]

Look up The Phonics Song on YouTube, it helped my son get the difference between letter sounds and names. It starts "A is for apple, a-a-apple, B is for ball, b-b-ball. It's a great song.

[Periwinkle007]

honestly don't worry about it, I have one just finished reception and one about to start reception. I taught both the names and the phonics and they seemed to automatically go with fuh not fff and you just correct them as they go along. my eldest started school able to read fluently but still did all phonics sessions with the rest of the class and just had different home reading books. I think most schools do one a day and the children pick them up very well. if she is doing any wrong then it won't last long.

[Tiggles]

I had to reteach DS3 who starts school in September as his initial 'day care' nursery (As opposed to the one he is now at that is attached to the school) taught him phonics incorrectly.
I had hoped that he would forget what they taught him, but 6months later he hadn't so when he started learning to read in the school nursery he was still saying 'suh' rather than 'ssss' for example.
I have just worked on them one by one with him, and he is slowly getting there. He now has a bit of a mixture e.g. he still says 'muh' at the beginning of a new word, but will remember it is mmmm when he sees it at the end of a word as he seems to manage to blend mum for example using muh, uh, mmmm (but can't do muh, uh, muh so doesn't see the need for mmm, uh, mmmm).
I know that his school reception do a new phonic everyday day, so I'm hoping he will get lots of practice next year in school and soon lose the 'incorrect phonics' completely.

[my2bundles]

Dont worry, reception and even years 1 and 2 cover phonics every day. they dont need to be taught before they start school.

[mrz]

Sorry but it isn't OK to to say duh, guh, fuh, huh, buh or any other sound with uh added. As people have said the clearer the sound the easier it is to hear the word when blending the sounds together.
I would advise leaving letter names (eff gee bee etc) until she knows all 44 sound as that can confuse some children.
Most schools will teach a sound a day and they aren't taught in alphabetic order. Once she knows the first set of sounds she will start to build words for reading and spelling

[breatheslowly]

So what do I say to my nearly 3 year old who is asking about what different words start with? She won't go to school for another 2 years and I am certainly no phonics expert, but I think it would be unfair not to answer her questions. She doesn't know any of the letter names. I can't say things like "fff" loud enough for her to hear them in the back of the car as they don't have any vowel in them (it is one of her favourite car conversations). Should I be doing letter names or is there a way for me to learn about phonics well enough to share with her and for her to not have to unlearn them?

[mrz]

Tell her the sound .. cat begins with the sound /c/ shop begins with the sound /sh/ daddy begins with the sound /d/ or ask her what sound she can hear when you say fffffffffffish ...letter names aren't helpful at the early stages and can confuse.

[Ferguson]

Hi - retired male TA here, with twenty years infant school experience -

Attention: TinkerTills & breatheslowly -

I will try to return sometime with more info, but meanwhile follow advice from mrz .

This may be of interest and useful, though it is jumping ahead somewhat, but gives you something to be going on with:

Phonics Dictionary

www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Phonics-Spelling-Dictionary-Reading/dp/019273413X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373490750&sr=8-1&keywords=Phonics%20dictionary&tag=mumsnet&ascsubtag=mnforum-21#reader_019273413X

[maverick]

breatheslowly, I suggest you download an Alphabet Code chart such as this one:

www.phonicsinternational.com/Training_illustrated_The%20English%20Alphabetic%20Code.pdf

[breatheslowly]

I still don't quite understand how you can say /c/ without it having a bit of a 'cu' sound to it as some consonant sounds aren't really sounds on their own, more sort of the beginning and ends to vowel sounds. I can do 'mmm' and 'sss' and 'sh', but some consonants are harder to voice without any vowel. I understand that teaching DD that 'car' starts with 'cee' isn't helpful and won't be doing that.

[mrz]

www.jollylearning.co.uk/wordpress/audio/ck.mp3

Some consonants are harder to say - I personally find /w/ difficult but it is very important to make the sound are "pure" as possible so /c/ not "cuh" (it's more of a click with tongue raised)

www.phonicsinternational.com/new_hear_sounds.html

[mrz]

and the consonant sounds are sounds in their own right not beginnings and ends to vowel sounds

[PastSellByDate]

TinkerTills:

Please don't worry. Your daughter will not be expected to know this all on day one. The point of school is to go there to learn - really!

The phonics system the school prefers will be taught there - through explanation by teacher, songs & movements and probably a myriad of other activities to teach them the various phonemes (sounds letters make) and then blended sounds.

Usually fairly shortly after starting the teacher will send home information about teaching phonics and learning to read. This will explain how it will be taught and what system(s) is(are) followed. As you've probably already worked out there are several competing approaches and jolly phonics/ oxford owl/ alphablocks/ etc... are not completely identical.

One thing to bear in mind is that at this age children are amazingly resilient and have fantastic ability to process speach and learn how to communicate. (That's why many feel it's easiest to learn another language whilst your young).

My advice is relax but keep an eye out for this information or ask about it at your first parent/ teacher meeting. If they're using jolly phonics, as Nagoo suggested the workbooks are brilliant - they're more like colouring books but there's lots of writing/ sounding out practice. Jolly phonics also has actions/ little songs to help remember the sounds.

I slightly missed the boat with DD1 (they were just rolling this out at our school and communication was not great) - but with DD2 the teacher had sounds of the week and high frequency words for the children to learn (many with actions - like bringing your knee up and with arms bent drawing both elbows down swiftly toward your knee for 'YES'). DD2 took to these action words like a fish to water and indeed her reading ability was leaps and bounds ahead of her sister at that age. (info on action words here www.actionwords.co.uk & example of movements for words here: www.actionwords.co.uk/RBsample-4.htm.

For the moment the more you read to your DD and talk with her, the better and don't worry about the rest or what she's learning or not learning this summer before school starts - it will sort itself out and, just to let you in on a secret, there's no one magic way to do this and everyone learns differently.

HTH

[mrz]

Does your daughter's school really have sound of the week PSBD?

[maizieD]

Puzzled...Why on earth would you have to learn 'yes' as an 'action word'? It is basic 'code' and easy to decode.

[breatheslowly]

Sorry Mrz - I suppose I mean that you don't get words without vowels - they are pretty integral to making sounds as consonants are different ways of restricting airflow, but you do need some airflow to get any sound out. I suppose I am thinking of how hard it is to sing with annunciation as the volume of vowels can be changed pretty easily but increasing the volume of most consonants is quite hard and you can see this in the video you linked to - the sounds on their own are quieter than the whole words for some of the sounds. I think I just need to practice lots - thanks for the links.

I'm a bit surprised that there isn't more of a push of this information to parents of pre-schoolers. DD can't be unusual in asking about words and sounds and by the time she reaches school I could well have completely messed up her learning.

Is it worth asking the school in advance about their system or do parents who do that sound a bit odd? Also will a nursery/preschool be teaching the right way?