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Behaviour/development

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Original poster

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

122 replies

JeanPoole · 18/05/2009 15:24

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

OP posts:

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Feenie · 18/05/2009 21:10

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:11

It's definitely better to teach the child the lower case pronunciation rather than A,B,C as they will learn the letter sounds as lower case sounds first at school and if you've taught them A,B,C instead of a,b,c, they'll have to relearn, which is extra work for them and extra work for the teacher.
Learning this way also makes it easier for them to sound out words like c-a-t because if they know c and a and t, they can work it out far easier than if they recognise the sounds as C,A,T (and might think it's pronounced kate!).

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:14

Bah humbug, frank - I'm not convinced by "relearning" - I think children are more than capable of grasping really complex concepts, and the idea that a letter has a name and (more than one) sound isn't so hard.

terramum · 18/05/2009 21:14

MilaMae, I think you're selling yourself bit short there...most parents are perfectly able to facilitate their child's education without school. Children are programmed to learn whether you have planned a lesson for it to happen or not .

1)You don't have to do any sort of curriculum, planned or otherwise.
2)Libraries are free you know
3)HE groups and after school clubs as well as schooled neighbours do most HE children ok!

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:15

No need to be rude Habbibu!
I agree that children are more than capable of learning that a letter has a sound and also a name, but if you're starting to look at letters with a 2yr old, far better to start with the a,b,c sounds rather than the neaming of letters - they have plenty of time for that later IMO.

terramum · 18/05/2009 21:17

ITA Habbibu. My DS (as explained earlier in the thread) has worked out just fine on his own that letters have a name and a sound.

mrz · 18/05/2009 21:18

The A is following the same rule as /a/ in able

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:19

My apologies, Frank - bah humbug was A Step Too Far. Anyway, do look at my ranting posts above about my childhood phonics traumas - I can barely say "a, b, c" in phonic fashion without gagging. I could just always see the exceptions, and it drove me mad - in a class of 30 there wasn't much the teacher could do, but it really has stuck with me.

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:23

mrz, but that's an exception to the "a" as in cat rule, and all I could ever see were exceptions, with endless "rules" to explain them. It drove me bonkers, it really did. And the more I've studied phonetics and accent etc the more I realise that these rules are extremely variable. But I was such a bolshy 5yo...

Scottsih nun in our primary school in Liverpool, trying to teach us homophones - she just did not get why not a single one of us didn't put pearl with peril.

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:24

I can understand where you're coming from - teaching methods don't always have universal success or appeal!
I think as parents we often worry far too much about how we ought to teach things to our children.

mrz · 18/05/2009 21:24

Please don't teach your child that lower case make the sounds A and a represent the same sound and have the same name.

mrz · 18/05/2009 21:28

Habbibu we have 26 letters and 44 phonemes (sounds in the English language - varies according to where you live)and around 150 ways of representing those 44 sounds using a combination of the 26 letters. They aren't exceptions just alternatives which most children pick up very easily.

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:29

I don't understand, mrz? The letter A and a have the same name and can be used to represent the same range of sounds - that's just the truth. (Should add that my degrees are in English language, so I do have a vested interest in accuracy here!)

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:30

mrz - I do know all that - studied lots of linguistics and have a PhD in EngLang!

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:33

And what's interesting for me is that dd has a Scottish accent, and mine is N English, so already our pronunciation is diverse, although my accent is weird, as it's become rhotic through long exposure.

mrz · 18/05/2009 21:34

My apologies I assumed you didn't because of your Amy post. I did three years of linguistics at university and my dissertation was on phonics v real books.

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:35

Sorry - mrz - my post earlier was snappy, and I didn't mean it that way.

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:36

I am also confused by mrz's angle on this

It is true that children have the ability to learn far more phonemes than we do as adults, which is why it's good to teach children foreign languages at a young age, and on this basis, I have no issues with the idea of children knowing the lower and upper case pronunciations of the alphabet - after all, there are 26 letters and each has different ways of being pronounced depending on what other letters are next to them in a word, whether there ius a "e" at the end of the word, whether it's an "a" or an "A" etc....

I was just suggesting that if OP needs to know which way of teaching letters to a =2yr old is easier for them to understand, then the a,b,c is more closely linked to the words she will be lerning at first....

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:36

sorry x post

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:37

apologies for typos!

mrz · 18/05/2009 21:43

Please don't teach your child that lower case make the sounds.
A and a represent the same sound and have the same name.

it works better with punctuation

Habbibu · 18/05/2009 21:47

I think, in hindsight, that as a child I was quite aware of phonetic rather than simply phonemic differences, and found it endlessly frustrating that there wasn't the time to discuss these.

IorekByrnison · 18/05/2009 21:51

So glad to see this thread. I heard some time ago that one should always introduced phonics and not letter names and since then I have been getting in the most appalling pickle while reading poor dd's Richard Scarry ABC book to her ("that's cuh - well at least sometimes it is - like in cat, but then sometimes it's suh - like in celery" etc etc). I think I'm with Habbibu on this. Letter names seem like a much simpler place to start.

Habbs what is the difference between phonetic and phonemic?

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:53

you've already said that mrz!
Who are you trying to tell? At the moment it's only me and Habbibu around on this thread and we've both already said that we agree that children can differentiate between the sounds that a,b,c and A,B,C represent written down.
A is pronounced ai (how I wish we had keyboard with phonetic alphabet for this thread!)and it isn't pronounced any other way in the English language. a, on the other hand, can be.
A is the capital letter for the lower case a. We don't write words in capitals - unless we're shouting on MN!
letter combinations such as ai, ay and ea make the "sound" A....

FrankMustard · 18/05/2009 21:55

sorry - and you IorekByrnison! For a while it was a bit quiet!

phoneme is a sound, phonetics is the study of the utterance in the human language and there's a phonetic alphabet that covers the sounds we make in language

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