QofQ - but I made that point; you have entered into the sounding out with the presumption that 'e' is always there for the 'e' (as in 'bed') sound - and good synthetic phonics teaches children that the 26 letters are used in all sorts of combinations for 40+ sounds and teach the children to recognise which sound to say when they see a letter or group of letters. And as I said before, even if English was sounded with an 'e' sound at the start, the rest is so easy it's ot going to be hard to work it out, is it? And that is one of the skills of synthetic phonics - 'tweaking' as yes, our language is extremely complicated as it has words form so many different origins.
But - all our words are phonetic as that means that the sounds are represented by letters - as they all are.
are you HONESTLY telling me that if a purely synthetics approach was taken to teaching british children to read EVERY child would learn to read as well as the next child????
well, to put it simply - YES
However, a little more accurately - all chidlren would learn to read. They would still vary in their rates of progress as do all people with everything they learn.
Visit the RRF and Jolly Learning sites for a start. The RRF has a wealth of information, statistics and evidence from all the studies and all the schools that practice exclusive synthetic phonics.
And, no - who cares about a chronological reading age. I think those figures are just used to illustrate progress and achievement as a good guide using commonly accepted assessment methods. What we want is for every child to be ABLE to read. Effectively and independently and quickly. Which they do using SP.
And now for a phonics lesson for those words you brought up that supposedly cannot be explained by phonics.
Remember that written words are constructed to each individual speech sounds is represented by a letter OR series of letters.
Letters are often used to represent different sounds, there is not just one sound assigned to each letter or group.
Synthetic phonics teaches children to recognise each letter and group of letters for all the sounds it represents and to be able to blend these to read words. They can therefore tackle any unknown or unfamiliar word with confidence and independence.
so, bearing these things in mind:
(in my explanations,I will represent the sounds by letters we most commonly associate with those sounds
said - the spoken word consists of 3 sounds: s-e-d
the 's' and 'd' are most common. The 'ai' is the tricky bit. 'ai' CAN be used for the 'e' sound in 'again' depending on how you pronounce it, in which case the words can be taught together. However, if not, then this is the only word where 'ai' is for 'e' but even blending it with a 'ai' pronunciation you can hear what it is supposed to be and 'tweak' it.
was - consists of 3 sounds: w-o-z
The 'w' is quite common. The 'o' sound is represented by the letter 'a' whenever the 'w' sound comes before it, as in want, wash, wasp, swan, swamp, squash. So this is quite common as well. The 's' at the end is usually pronounced 'z' as in many words except possibly 'bus'
one - this to me is one probably really weird word. The spoken word consists of 'w-u-n' and the 'w' sound really isn't represented, as far as I can see. I usually teach that the 'u' is there with the o_e as in done, some, love etc and the 'n' is common.
friend - all quite common except for the 'ie' for the 'e' sound where this is the only word. There is some history of the origin of the word that I tell concerning how Freya is the goddess of friendship whcih 'friday' is named after, so when writing the word 'friend' remember friday and start it off like friday begins. SOunds complicated written like that but it always helped my kids.
where - 'wh' for 'w' quite common and I teach 'ere' for the 'air' sound with 'there'
Our language is very complicated with all sorts of 'rules' but synthetic phonics teaches all these in a systematic and thorough way which is also fast paced so children acquire all these 'rules' quickly and with plenty of reinforcement in their reading so they can quickly learn to decode unfamiliar words by themselves.