Reading help required for 4yr old DS

[Barmymummy]

DS is 4.8 and due to some delayed development in some areas (speech & receptive language being one of them) we deferred him from school until January. He has just done his first full time week and has settled in brilliantly.

I have been doing his phonics with him so he has started school knowing nearly all of the phonic sounds of the alphabet and school were thrilled. However, I knew he was going to have trouble going onto the next step because I can see he just hasn't clicked onto 'words' yet.

DS is great at telling you what 'sound' a word begins with but has no concept of what you are even talking about when you ask him what other sounds he can hear.

EG "DS, what sounds can you hear in the word CAT?" DS will answer with C but has no clue whatsoever/cannot hear the A or T sound. School have also picked this up. He learns words by rote. EG, he was sent home some cards with the words Floppy, Chip, Biff, Mum, Dad etc (you know the ones lol!) and once he had been told what they said he could produce the right one every single time. However, show him the same word written in a book or a different bit of paper and he has no clue what it says. In other words he can't 'relate' the words when seen in another context.

My dad is mildly dyslexic and this plays on my mind. School will instantly pooh pooh any talk of this because quite rightly he has only been at school 4 weeks and he is only 4.8 yrs old but something is niggling.

Anyone come across this? Any ideas how I can get him to learn? Or is just a case of waiting for his little brain to catch up and click and be 'ready' to do this. I feel that this is ahead of his abilities atm tbh.

Thanks for reading

Hi, my ds is almost 5 and in reception. To start with it is all a little overwhelming for them. Reading is a skill that takes them years to master to our level. Some things I used to help were I'd have all the phonic sounds he was doing up around the kitchen and as j was making tea I'd say what's that one, I'd do this with 2 and 3 letter words too. I also would cut letters out play snap with them and for eg the word cat is easier for him to see if you first show him the card 'c' then 'a' then 't' and sort of spell it. Others will ptob be able to give you better advice but I found this helped. Your ds sounds like he is doing great knowing all his phonic sounds. Some in my ds class struggle and they've been there since September. In our school they call the next bit blending so how the sounds come together to make a word. This is really tricky for them but lots of practise and he will get there. Good luck on your ds learning journey xxx

do you have any letter flashcards/magnetic letters? or you could make some i suppose

get 3 letters he confiidently knows the sounds for (and make sure you model proper phonic sounds with eg, mmm not m-uh)

then make a c-v-c word putting them side by side so m a t

make the sound for each letter then say the sounds faster and faster together until he can hear the word

you will need to say mat/cat/bat the first few times but then he sound start to get the idea

Singing the sounds helps too and hold the vowel so
c aaaaa t. The c and the t are short sounds so when you sound out it actually sounds like cat.

Thanks everyone. Yes little ducks I have done all that and when/if he eventually gets the sounding out right he can't even hear that he has said the word!

Very frustrating! Anyhow, tonight he has come home with his first book with words in it and it basically has Floppy on each wpage. I showed him the word and then hand wrote out 4 daft sentences with the word Floppy written 4 times. I gave him a highlighter pen and asked him to show me where the word Floppy was - and he did it!! Maybe progress is being made I think I will have to get him to practice spotting the words he 'knows' in different texts to give him the idea. I hope the blending thing will come in time

It doesn't help that my 7 yr old daughter was an absolute whizz with reading and had no problem at all....am realising now how we took her reading for granted!!

sorry i thought he was your first and the whole phonics thing was new to you as well as him

dd loves super readers on nick jr. (if you have sky) which is based on building up words from letters, although irritatingly it ias in block capitals

there are lots of cool websites too, starfall (free) and reading eggs (subscription) but tbh if he has only been in school a month I'm sure it isnt something to worry about

I'm a believer in it clicking when they are ready and think the main thing is to make sure they don't get stressed out about it and lose confidence. And 4.8 is very very young- many children don't "get" reading till a lot later- more towards the end of year 1. For us low key practice and reassurance that he would get there in the end worked well with the son who was slower to read. Sometimes this involved us backing way way off if we were finding his early lack of progress a bit worrying. He is now a more voracious reader than our other son who seemed to learn to read by osmosis very early in his school career.

My dd was like this for a while too. Her teacher said this was all perfectly normal and some children do just take that bit longer.
She then prgressed to being able to say
C-A-T sounding the word out but it still didn't compute into a word to her then it suddenly all fell into place.
Shortly after this we moved area and she cahnged schools, she was becoming a fantastic reader and flying through the ORT books but still couldn't (or wouldn't by this point) recognise words out of context so the only thing she would read herself was the ORT, again reassured by her teacher that this was all totally normal and that they all catch on to it at different stages.

Now only a matter of months after still not reading out of context can and will read anything (including the graffiti on a bus one day )

I think Skegness is totally right that it takes them different lengths of time to click and there are many that go into the next school year still unable to read so he sounds like he is doing fantastic.

Littleducks - Starfall is brilliant!! Thank you so much! Admittedly getting DS to actually sit there and do it might be my next challenge .

He is so defeatist, gives up before he has even tried, makes me so sad to see him like this because we are always so full of praise and enthusiam. Thanks for all your help and advice, its much appreciated

Hi there, I am a teacher who works with struggling readers. firstly I wouldn't be worried-he sounds like he is doing fine for his age - the UK is one of the few countries in the world that attempts to teach formal reading to pre 5, or even 6yr olds. That said,it might help to separate the sounds from the letters at this stage - 'sounding out' by reading the letters in turn and saying the associated sound is a relatively advanced reading skill and not to be expected until children are reading several sentences and have a sight vocab of common words. try using counters or blocks or whatever to represent the sounds in a word. move them apart to segment and back together to blend the sounds. if he has had speech issues he may be slower to develop this phonemic awareness so could well need more explicit teaching of sound processing than his sister. it can take weeks to establish this word segmentation and i have worked with numerous older kids who couldn't do it.if he really struggles start with words of 2 or more syllables and just try representing each with a clap or a bang on a drum etc.e.g. get him to separate 'see' from 'saw'. clap and say the first part, then the next. the main focus is to learn to separate and sequence the sounds in words so that later on he can match them to letters. if he does have dyslexic tendencies then he will more than likely need to work on his phonemic awareness as this tends to be the area of difficulty. hope this helps

Thats is reall really helpful, thank you so much Will definately do that with him. Many thanks