Four-year-old can spell any 3 letter word but cannot blend any when reading

[Balalabab]

Not 100% sure where to post this.

Basically practicing 4 and a half year old phonics, words and blending to keep up over summer holidays.

He started at a school nursery last year so has already been taught this in school.

Please can someone tell me what they think about this…

• He can read every single letter phonic sounds individually

• When I put the cards down next to each other in simple CVC and he has to read and blend them he cannot do it. He can only do cat and that’s because I think he has sight learned it.

• If I reverse it and give him 3 cards of any 3 letter word and say make ‘dog’, make ‘hip’, make ‘fig’ he can instantly spell out all the sounds and place the, down in the correct order. Ie. ‘F…I…g… FIG’

Is this normal. It’s like he can do it backwards in all circumstances but not forwards for the simplest words. So he does know how words and sounds are working.

Does this mean he could be dyslexic? His dad is severely dyslexic and it something I have been worried about hence working on the reading so early for him.

If so what does that mean? Do we have to teach in a different way?

He starts reception next week and they are brilliant, but he’s in a state school and he’s quiet so I do want to support in anyway I can so he doesn’t slip between the cracks.

Thank you

That's what they say but they have a national curriculum and targets for literacy in Reception that are not flexible. Hence my child being placed in a catch up group at 4. That is not compatible with a true play-based approach. My son's teacher more or less admitted it was not sufficiently flexible to take account of children who need to play more than others because they are younger or on a slightly different developmental path.

Blending (reading the sounds and putting the word together) and segmenting (breaking the word down in to each sound) are two different things, and it sounds like your child has cracked segmenting - this is fab! Much more than the average child can do going in to Reception.
Easy game to help - "X, can you find your b-a-g," or, "Let's h-o-p". He'll get it with time and practice!
As others have mentioned, sight-reading is one of many reading skills needed. As is inferring meaning and words from picture clues.
The most important thing you can do at this stage is read together - you read, he points out any sounds of words he knows. And read often! Instilling a lovely for reading is much more important.
Please try not to worry. He will do everything at his own pace. ❤️

He is 4
he is doing well
relax

No-one reads whole words - it just feels as if we are doing so. Research into how good readers read (that is those who can decode to automaticity and read fluently and with understanding) reveals that every letter is read. Once we are good readers we no longer consciously 'sound out' a word unless it is unfamiliar.
You are lucky that your children learned to read without apparent phonics. The 'whole word' method of teaching reading (also 'real books', 'look and say' etc) relies on memorising words and recognising them or using context to recognise words. If you know how many words there are in English you will realise how unlikely this method is to reliably produce good readers.

I could have written your post 9 years ago-

And I’ve spent 8.5 of those years trying to get three different schools to understand that I’m not some “tiger mum” or whatever the expression is; I just knew that my child was dyslexic, and that we needed to work together to find different ways to help her learn & progress.

finally at Easter her current school asked me if though she might be dyslexic… 🙄 I reminded them that I’d discussed this with them multiple times since the previous summer, “oh yes, I can see that in her notes. Do you think she’d benefit from a formal assessment?”
hmmm , go on then, why not eh?
12 page report back, severely dyslexic, multiple recommendations for support/intervention…for some reason the school seem quite surprised! 🤔

All this to say, he might be, but don’t expect the school to do anything - the earliest they tend to do screening is 7-8 - and even then some elements of dyslexia don’t really show up til later.

best you can do in the meantime is read up yourself on ways to support. As PP mentioned British Dyslexia is a good place to start.

and might seem odd, but check your dc pencil grip to see if they have mastered the “tripod” if not, try to correct it now as it’s tough to change as they get older and will make writing “slightly” easier.

If a child is inferring words from the picture clues they are not reading and will not become good readers. The letters of the words alone are what will tell a child what that word is (even if they mispronounce it). Context (and pictures for small children, but pictures rapidly become useless except as illustrations) will give meaning to unknown words.
'Sight reading' is the way in which we feel we are reading when we decode automatically and so fast we are not aware of doing it - except when we hit a word we do not know.
It is excellent advice to read lots of stories, though I would not encourage a child to pick out words he/she 'knows' - not helpful and distracts from the story which is the point of reading, which should be fun.

'the' and 'and' are both readable phonetically, though the phonics are quite difficult. Why are you spoiling a bedtime story by turning it into a reading lesson? I can't think of a better way to put your DC off reading.

What’s difficult about ‘and’?
Even ‘the’ is not really tricky once children have been taught voiced and unvoiced ‘th’ - and they are, in Reception.

Your second DC worked out phonics himself - which is excellent. Phonics doesn't kill interest in reading if it is done properly, which should be fun, with lots of decodable books at the right phonics level and lots and lots of reading aloud to children and talking about the stories and books so that their vocabulary is beyond their phonic ability for a while. The 'whole word' method of teaching reading relies on the 3 cueing system of semantics, grammar and context and these do not work at all well and amount to teaching a child to guess words from the context as they 'read' - and they are not reading. This is why the phonics check was introduced by Gove, to check literally that a child that appeared to be reading was reading and not just remembering words and using picture and context clues to guess words - this is the reason for the nonsense words in the check, which rely entirely on phonic decoding.
You are completely right about lots of stories.

OP, my son is the same age and he is exactly the same!

Agree. No need to teach 'sight' words and it is disruptive to do so as it suggests that phonics can be dispensed with.

All stems from a misunderstanding and lack of training as to what common exception, or ‘tricky’ words are - they were always supposed to be words which contained sounds which hadn’t been taught YET. It’s always been a huge misconception for teachers to assume that meant they were non-decodable. The advice was always to teach children to decode them from left to right, with teachers highlighting the tricky bit. They were never ever supposed to be taught as sight words.

My daughter couldn't read when she started school as she hadn't been pushed by us or the pre-school. She's now a doctor so it didn't hold her back. Some kids who had been pushed and could read at an early age struggled later so early reading isn't necessarily an indication of academic ability. The most important thing is that they are relaxed about it and happy, then the learning will follow.

Just wading into the sight words debate here. Yes, all sight words are phonetically decodable when you’ve worked through all the phases of phonics. However, it is developmentally appropriate to teach some of them before the phonics rule, because many of the most frequently-used words in English are decodable. If you only read books with decodable words, you end up with Reception children reading books like ‘Pip can sit. Pip can nap. Pip can sip. Sip sip sip!’ which is obviously boring AF and makes reading so boring.

The quality of decodable books is improving rapidly, but they still are not a replacement for proper reading. Until very recently, we used natural language books (or ‘easy readers’) to teach reading and then had a separate phonics book alongside. These easy readers would be called things like ‘At the zoo’ and it would have sentences like ‘look at the giraffe! Look at the elephant! Look at the lion!’ etc etc. By the end of reading one of these, a child would be able to read ‘look’ , ‘at’ and ‘the’, and they would be able to use the pictures to name the animals (because obviously you wouldn’t reach a 4 yo ‘ph’ saying ‘f’ in elephant or the long ‘i’ in ‘lion’). Using pictures builds early inference skills. Inference is useful when you get older and read more complicated texts. I really think it’s a shame that these types of books have been dropped and replaced with just phonics ones, and I wouldn’t discourage a parent from teaching a child to recognise sight words or use pictures.

OP, I don’t think you need to worry about your child’s development but please do not stop doing the sight words if you feel it’s useful.

Also, just to add that remembering sight words IS reading. When I’m reading a book, 99.9% of the words I will recognise on sight. I use phonics for new words I haven’t seen before, and I’ll use my implicit knowledge I’ve got from years and years of reading to decode it (sometimes wrongly which is why I pronounced archive wrong until I was in my 30s.)

Justice for sight words!

What is wrong with you?? My kid started reception not reading and could read by Christmas. Weird you even bothered before then.

He is actually really far ahead, my daughter didn’t start learning any of this until reception. For most kids who are at school reading seems to really ‘click’ in year 1. I’ve never done phonics etc at home, just focussed on enjoying reading books together. My daughter, now 7, loves reading chapter books. No need to rush him or worry.

I’m going to repeat this:

What you describe is learning words to automaticity - recognising them ON sight, which is the ultimate aim of reading, regardless of the teaching method used.
Learning words BY sight is a teaching method that was popular but had no evidence base whatsoever. It is now outdated because of the wealth of evidence available to the contrary

That’s just mean. If you can’t say anything nice, just don’t bother.

I'm not a fan of phonics and it's not for every child. I taught mine to read without using phonics although we did sound blend and do magic E. I found Alphablocks great too.

One thing I did stop was Peppa Pig. Mine used to copy her irritating habit of spelling out words phonetically to ask what they meant. They didn't do this before they watched it and it became a really bad habit and affected their reading too. They stopped doing it when we stopped with the PP...

although we did sound blend and do magic E. I found Alphablocks great too.

You successfully taught your child to read using phonics.

One thing I did stop was Peppa Pig. Mine used to copy her irritating habit of spelling out words phonetically to ask what they meant. They didn't do this before they watched it and it became a really bad habit and affected their reading too. They stopped doing it when we stopped with the PP.

Your child reached the stage of reading where they did not need to overtly sound out and blend. This is a natural stage and something that was meant to happen.

You did a splendid job in teaching your child to read 👍

PS Magic E is very outdated and doesn’t work. eg ‘come’, ‘give’, ‘done’ - they are all alternative graphemes (ways of writing) <m>, <v> and <n>, which is much more helpful than magic e (which is clearly not magic).

He is four. Nuff said.

Put away all such stuff like flashcards, word games etc.
Just have lots of fun picture books for him to look at. Read aloud to him every day. Go to visit a library every week.

No more than that. In fact any more than that may well be damaging. If there are still concerns when he is 6-7 then it might be worth wondering but until then just let him be.

Depends, tbh. Some kids have a thirst for learning. I agree that if he doesn’t, let him be and just read. Enjoy sharing books. It’s a joyous time and it passes so quickly.

The suggestion that it could be damaging is a bit daft, was my point. Not if he enjoys it: