Creole, going back to your original question. Teaching your ds how to read using synthetic phonics is quite straight-forward. The first thing you need to do is purchase a copy of the Jolly Phonics handbook. Then work through it systematically. The main two things to remember are: a) teach your ds to ?sound out? words all-through-the-word. Don?t focus on just the first and last sounds; you need to show him how to read all-through-the-word, e.g. c-a-t, sh-i-p, th-i-s etc.
The thing about teaching phonics is that you learn all the sounds in the English language and different ways to write these sounds down. So think of reading as ?speech sounds?. The words on the page are just ways of writing down these sounds. In the English language there are often more than one way of writing a sound. For example the sound ?ay? can be written like ?ai? as in ?rain?; ?ay? as in ?day?; or ?a_e? as in ?cake?; ?eigh? as in ?sleigh?. Similarly ?ee? can be written as ?ee? as in ?street?; ?ea? as in ?read? etc. This is just to give you an example of how there is more than one way of writing the same spoken sound. The problem is that on the face of it, it seems complicated but it isn?t because you learn about it a step at a time. With Jolly Phonics children learn the ?ai? version of ay at first; they also learn ?oi? as in ?coil?; ?ue? as in ?true? and so on.
b) definitely, definitely, no memorising of whole words or guessing. Teach him to read phonetically first, then you can focus on the few words that cannot be read in this way which will have to be memorised, e.g. are, was, were, what, where, who, people, said.
c) with regards to his reading book, there is nothing really that you can do about the school?s reading scheme. The only thing you can do is help him to read the words with the sounds that he has already learned. One of the mums said she had purchased some of the Ruth Miskins books, so I assume you can buy them in single copies. Ruth Miskins is an excellent scheme, so maybe you could invest in some of theses. You will find that once he can read phonetically, he will be able to read the books that he is given at school.
Many schools use the Oxford Reading Tree. The early books in this scheme are not good for beginning readers, but once they get on to the higher levels they are better and can be read phonetically.
Just keep asking the questions, no matter how small and for expert advise visit either of these websites: www.syntheticphonics.com www.rrf.org.uk