Five year old having problems with alphabet

[pinkhousesarebest]

I am becoming concerned about my five year old, infact almost six year olds, inability to assimilate the sounds of the alphabet. We live in France, so have been blissfully unemcumbered by formal learning up to now. I have been trying to teach her to read with Headsprout and Starfall, as I did pretty effortlessly with my ds, but she cannot link letter to sound at all.

The school have now said they want to put her in an after school group to see can they help her a bit. She was selectively mute at school for two years, so I am hoping that that might explain why she might be behind in school. But that would not explain why she would have problems with English too. Can anybody give me any advice on how to progress? Thanks

Is your DD in grande section? My DD is in grande section and does a lot of letter work in French.

Aren't bilingual children usually about 6 months behind? Perhaps, like here, learn one letter a week? We do jolly phonics and the first letters are s,a,t,p,i,n....these letters have both an action and a sound....'s' is wavy arm(like a snake) and sssss, 'a' is ants running up the arm saying 'a', 'a', 'a'....these work well as they ahve a visual, an action and a sound.

Hi Anna, we talked before about our bilingual efforts. Yes she is in G.S, and the teacher does loads of work with sounds, so much so that they go into C.P able to read, or at least decipher. I have been banging on for a while now to the teacher about her having difficulty at home with phonics, but she said she thought she was fine and coping well.

Posie I found my d.s to be slow to speak, but he caught up quickly, and has had no problem in school. He was,retrospectively I now realise, an effortless reader. I have some J.P flashcards. Must dig them out.

D.d has always been a lively, interested child, with a great vocabulary in both languages. This now makes me worry all the more. I am beginning to think of Dyslexia. I love France dearly, but it is not a country to have a dys in.

One of my boys was still very stilted in his sounding out of every bloody letter until very recently, he's nearly eight, but he was just late. It must be very hard if you're not a natural reader to do it in one language let alone two very different ones. Some children just getit don't they.

Maybe you should take her to see a speech therapist with experience of bilingualism for an assessment? Grande Section is a time when a lot of bilingual children seem to need a bit of speech therapy. I have a few names/numbers but of course they are all in Paris - if you feel able to make the trip, CAT me and I'll pass on the info.

Thanks Anna, but we are near Macon, so miles away. It is reassuring though to think that this might be a bilingual issue. Dd is much more frenchified than ds, and seems less able to keep the two seperate in the way that ds did. Though he is seeing a speech therapist to extend his vocabulary in French!

At the back of my mind though, I do think that however mixed up it all is for her, she should by now be able to identify some sounds, whether that is in French or English. I have lauched into a heavy duty rearguard action sort of campaign, so I will reserve judgement for a while.