when showing dd a alphabet puzzle toy, should i say the letters or sound the letters out?

[JeanPoole]

like should i say a b c d
or aa bb cuu duu etc

shes 2 years old and i'm wondering if i teacg her say d is d, will she find it harder to understand it makes the sound duu

Depends how she'll learn to read eventually. I think schools like them to only learn the phoenetic sounds they'll learn later on - I think they learn quicker if they haven't learnt the letter names. However, if the school she'll go to is not phonics obsessed, then teach her the letter names. My DDs have learnt the letter names and never done phonics at all and one is a fluent reader and has been for some time now (she's now just about to turn 6) and the other is clearly learning to read the way DD1 did, no problem.

Maybe see if you can get hold of Read with Me: An Apprenticeship Approach to Learning to Read by Liz Waterland (out of print but easy to get second hand from amazon) to learn about how children learn to read best.

3 to 5 ish

I wouldn't call any school 'phonics obsessed' - but most teachers know that a good grounding in phonics helps most children to read. Decent teachers never stopped teaching them in the first place. Just as, now that synthetic phonics are compulsory, we won't stop teaching other methods to help children who learn better through these.

what do you think to this?here

FB thanks for the book reccomendation.
i will look that up

i really would like to help my dd as i was a terrible reader at school.

I've always said the letter names to DS when we came across alphabet stuff in his toys as we were keen to avoid just using phonics (he is HE and we're not using any prescribed method, just leaving him to learn naturally). But he has picked up a lot of phonics through some of the PC games he plays and stuff on the tv like Fun with Phonics on Cbeebies. Now he's almost 5 he is equally happy with the letter names and their sounds and can relate them to each other very well.

Phonics as a base is only necessary for children learning to read younger than they would naturally - which is most children in the UK. Phonics is a useful tool to learn a bit of here and there for children who have learnt to read when they're naturally ready, who have learnt the whole-words way.

One of the reasons that, even if we weren't planning to home educate for always, I would definitely do it for the first years, without a doubt.

Is that right? I refused to even contemplate learning to read until after I started school aged 5, and wonder if that's why I preferred the whole words approach?

I personally think all children learn to read better if they're allowed to do it the whole words way in their own time, unfortunately that means that some children won't be ready until they're 8, 9 or 10.

That's fine if they're HE'd and can use other ways of learning, but in school, one has to be able to read in order to learn the way school works.

A lot of other countries (and steiner schools) don't start literacy formally until after age 7, which is much more appropriate IMO. They have a higher literacy rate too in those countries usually.

My DD1 learnt very young for an autonomous learner, IME. I know families with children who didn't learn to read until they were much older, but when they did, it only took a few weeks (as it did my DD1).

hmm. That's interesting. dd will be going to school, but I heard one of the authors of the study which demonstrated benefits of HE fairly recently (last year, maybe) on the radio that children in school can still benefit from parents using HE type ideas at home, so I'm squirreling this info away for future reference.

Was on a reading course on Friday and they said to teach letter names first then sounds. As someone said, letters like c don't always make the same sound so you teach from what is always true (names) and then the exceptions (sounds).

I think that most schooled children of involved, interested parents do most of their learning out of school anyway. School, IMO, only really benefits children of parents who aren't at all interested in them, never take them places, don't read them books, don't talk to them etc.

What a load of bollocks. You've just denounced my whole job in one ridiculous swoop. Do you seriously think that no child in my class benefits unless their parents aren't interested in them?

Loopy.

No, I mean that they don't need to be in school to learn the things they're meant to learn there if their parents are interested and involved. How is that denouncing your whole job?

Read your own post!

I have. I'm assuming you're a teacher? Then you're presumably well trained to get across some set information to a large group of children, to keep them interested, and to keep them behaving well, and to do so without spending hours just having long conversations with one or two children? A highly important job that there is no way I could do - no way I'd have the patience for.

However, I could help my own children to learn all the things they need to learn just as well, if not better. I only have 4 children, and am with them nearly the whole time - much easier to impart information that way, isn't it?

I respect (most of) your views on HE, and I would agree that one-to-one teaching is a good place to start. One-to-one by someone qualified would be better, but you wouldn't get that at school anyway and you know your own child better than anyone else.

Where I part company with you is where you say "most schooled children of involved, interested parents do most of their learning out of school anyway". That would render my job useless. They may learn most about other things from their parents - a wider general knowledge, for example, or extra-curricular experiences, but not curriculum based stuff, no - most of that comes from teachers, it's what we do. (Apart from in your case, where you do that. But you said most schooled children.)

Then this bit - "School, IMO, only really benefits children of parents who aren't at all interested in them, never take them places, don't read them books, don't talk to them etc."
If that were true, why would I bother teaching at all, unless I taught in a truly deprived area where parents didn't care?

Some of the children I teach are deprived, and I enjoy helping them to achieve - but I also enjoy teaching other children with full support from their parents.

On the Prof Regan nursery programme one of the specialists said that children can get confused by using the name of letters and the sounds, so we now sound them out. Makes saying 'Where's your abc book' a bit laborious

My mother puts her finger under each word as she says it when reading to my LO 19 months. I'm wondering if I should do it too, maybe then she'll get used to the hearing the word and seeing it at the same time... what do you think?

I'm not sure I buy the whole "confusion" argument - aren't grammatical concepts much more confusion, and yet grasped with relative ease by most young children.

I wouldn't bother with the whole showing thing at 19 mo (lazy mother emoticon) instilling a love of books is (I think) much more important.

God, that was badly written! I think I'd rather try something tricky with a child, in a relaxed and playful way, and see how they cope, rather than assume that they'll get confused and not let them try the harder thing. If that makes any sense!

That's a bit overdramatic flamingo! "School, IMO, only really benefits children of parents who aren't at all interested in them, never take them places, don't read them books, don't talk to them etc"

Following that logic, there will be no point me sending DS to school at all. I am interested in him, I take him places, I read with him and talk to him, so by your logic there will be no benefit to him attending school at all.

However as I have no time or inclination to actually educate him at home, it seems to me that despite me being interested in him, talking to him and reading with him he'll probably be better off going to school than not.

Amy is phonetically regular once you know all the rules the letter 'y' at the end of a word can make the /ie/ sound. Jolly phonics teaches 'shy i doesn't like to be on the end so along comes toughy y {twee smiley]

Iwoulddodoctorwho I don't know who took your reading course but I wonder how they expect a child to read unknown words using only letter names

gee why pee ess why...see eye are see you ess...

SarfEast I would just read ... children do pick up words naturally (you know how they can join in with their favourite books and know straight away if you miss a bit) it tunes them into language and gives them an understanding of the joy reading can bring.

Can't say I agree with Flamingo's comment either. I'm an ex teacher and even though I'm an annoyingly interested parent and have a loft full of keystage 1 resorces I could never give to my 3 dc what they're getting at school.

1)I don't have the time to plan properly for all areas of the curriculum. To do it properly I'd have to spend the same amount of time planning for my 3 as I would a class of 30(every night and all Sunday then,no actually more as I'd have to cover 2 year groups each year). I have no intention of ever doing this as would rather get paid to do it for other people's dc if I'm going to be up all night and working over the weekend.

2)I don't have the money to buy all the resources and books my 3 have access to at school.

3. I don't have a variety of children to socialise with that my 3 have at school.

So as an interested parent school does benefit my children greatly and mine too would be better off going than not.

What a load of tosh, flamingo. My intelligent DS with 2 interested and involved parents and loads of teachers in the extended family bursts out of school full of the stuff he learned and the class debates they had and the way they sparked off each other and worked things out for themselves and solved problems and and and...

Even if I were suitably qualified and equipped with the requisite patience to teach him at home there is no way he would learn at the rate he learns in a group of his peers facilitated by excellent teachers who have put a lot of work into planning and executing the lessons.

mrz - it was the A, not the y I was thinking about in Amy (and do you want to send me back to therapy with that rhyme? Do you?)

Ok, mostly everyone disagrees with me. I'll not say another word. Sorry!

Friends?