Phonetic alphabet - how does it help?

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DS is starting a new preschool and they've asked that when we work with him at home we should use the phonetic alphabet only and not the actual names of the letters. They've also asked that we do only lower-case letters. I'm going to ask the school about this but from talking to a few friends it seems to be one of those US/British differences.

In my experience in the US children are taught the names of letters with their sounds at the same time. We also learned upper and lower case together. This makes more sense to me as it will all need to be learned at some point, but maybe that's just because doing it all at once is an approach to which I'm accustomed. What are the benefits of learning only the phonetic alphabet and lower case letters in the beginning? Is there a book that could help me to understand this approach? I'm happy for DS to learn this way and will follow the school's guidelines at home but would like to understand it all a bit better.

oh, ghosty - re: cough, through and though

These are tricky ones, admittedly, and I would deal with them especially, but they are not impossible and still follow some logic.

'gh' is often used to spell the 'f' sound as in cough, rough, trough and laugh. Normally, I would only teach this final consonant once the vowel spellings were known, but these are so infrequent they might as well be taught at the same time. So, cough and trough would go together as on these occasions, the 'ou' both represent the 'o' sound, and then laugh and rough would have to be separate. I would probably display the words with the approprite JP picture reference above the vowel letters just to reinforce those.

'though' has two sounds: th+oa. the 'th' is regular but the 'ough' for oa is not. I think this is alone in its sound/letter representations, so it would have to be learnt alone and I would probably display it with the appropriate JP picture above the 'ough' again.

The same with 'through' in teaching it: it has 3 sounds - th+r+oo where 'ough' is used for 'oo' and right now, I can't think of any other words that do it.

English is a very complicated language as our words come from so many historical sources, but as most of these original languages also have a phoneme representational source, they are all phonically decodable, albeit with a huge veriety of spellings for each sound. But, this does not make English non-phonetical or too irregular to teach systematically. What it means for me is that it is more important to teach it systematically so avoid confusion.

As long as children can hear that spoken words are sequences of sounds, and know that these sounds have letter representations, be it one or more, and are taught blending skills, then all they need to be taught systematically is all the representations for these sounds. Of course there will be some words that need to be taught separately - and I think we have found some!

It is the limited, ineffective 'traditional' phonics of 26 letters = 26 sounds that renders 'phonics' teaching virtually impossible.

'ough' as pronounced 'oa' is also in dough.

thanks I've been out the classroom too long - I don't have these lists of words right at the front of my brain any more!

It was only because we've had the playdough out today
Can't think of one for 'ough' = 'oo' though.

"Through", though I think that is the only instance of 'ough' as 'oo' (well, "throughout" as well of course).