Pardon my dimness, but infant teachers, what is..................

[Aero]

........a medial phoneme?

Does it simply mean middle letter, or is a secret code that I have never heard of before, but feel I should have?

Dd has received a sheet of words and been asked to find words with the 'medial phoneme' 'o' or 'e', but there are no words on the sheet with those as middle letters which is why I ask. I assume then that she is meant to think of these words herself.

Also, is it the latest craze to try and teach infants who have not yet mastered their letters properly to try and do 'fancy' joined up writing. Dd is totally confused and frustrated with all this and has been in tears tonight because she finds it too difficult. She's 5.5 and in year one and I feel there is just far too much pressure to learn all this. Also, to learn spellings and be expected to write them down when she still gets her letters mixed up. She can spell the words aloud, but gets them marked wrong when she's clearly just written certain letters back to front! This just upsets her as she knows she spelt the word right iyswim.
Can you tell I'm a frustrated parent?!!

I put this in chat, then realise this might be a better place for it.

God, I hate homework for primary school children and reducing FIVE year olds to tears because they got their homework wrong is just madness IMO.
As for using jargon on poor benighted parents...words fail me. I'd be very tempted to just say, 'I am an educated adult of XX years old and have no idea what a 'medial phoneme' is and suggest you do not use plain English in future if you expect me to do my daughter's homework'.
I would also tell the teacher that if she is marking spellings then it is NOT helpful to mark correct spellings as wrong due to the totally normal reversing of letters in young children - the spelling was CORRECT ffs.
My ds is a very precocious reader IMO who absolutely lives for books, but this sort of thing would put him off the whole language and learning thing altogether.

Or if you want to be polite you could say, 'This has not been done as I have no idea what a 'medial phoneme' is.'

Whhhhhat? "Medial phoneme" for 5-year-olds??? We have a problem in this country with illiteracy and this is the solution... scare kids witless at 5?

Have just asked DP who is a linguistics academic, and he says it doean't mean anything particularly - in scientific terms medial is something very complex to do with position of tongue in the mouth, but it can't mean that here. Phoneme essentially means unit of sound. He reckons they just mean "middle sound" eg as "o" is the middle sound in the word "dog".

But whatever it means, I'd ask the school about making learning somewhat more accessible!

Message withdrawn

lol Aloha. I'm going to bring it up at the parents evening next week. Dd is already not the keenest student and I'd hate to think this could add fuel to the fire.

Thank you lockets. That is what I thought.

So do I Cod, but not at the expense of dd getting unnecessarily confused. Year 2 is early enough. Either that or teach it from the very beginning. Not teach printing in reception and then confuse them by changing things before they've even got the hang of letter formation.

Do you know what - I think the teacher is showing off and trying to make the parents feel inadequate

I haven't got a clue what a "medial phenome" is (well I do but I didn't know it was called that) and I used to work in a school as an Early Years classroom assistant, so "did" them on a daily basis!

Completely unnecessary and says a lot about the teacher IM(not so)HO.

I honestly think you should not do it at all and say that you would guess that a medial phoneme is the middle letter, but you think it should be phrased in proper English.
Or as Mr Bowie put it, 'and if the homework gets you down/we'll put it on the fire and take the car down town'
Splendid sentiments IMO -and Bowie Jnr got a very good degree in the end, iirc.

Oh and re. joined up writing, as you say, getting them to do joined up before they have mastered the letters is just stupid and bound to lead to tears/frustration/failure. However good a writer the kids are, they simply haven't had enough practice at the age of 5 to be confident about learning new ways of writing letters.

I stick to my theory - I bet she likes to go on teacher training courses and say "well I teach Y1 and they are already doing joined up writing and it's all down to my superior teaching you know"

noooooooo lockets!!!!! You are allowed to know it, just not to parade it round as a way of making other people feel inadequate, which the teacher is doing, but you're not.....

....I'll just go and dig a hole I think

What is wrong with first, middle and last!?

That's true lockets, it's not that kids can't grasp long/obscure words (they can often reel off dinosaur names eg) but it is focusing on things like this at the expense of straightforward, useful learning. It is unecessary and the situation the OP is in demonstrates one big problem - it leaves parents who want to help out in the cold.

Did you see the headline recently, 12 million of the workforce have a reading age under 11. Many teachers, let alone everyone else, can't grasp basic punctuation, spelling and grammar. Is this really going to help? Isn't it more important to learn to enjoy reading, and learn to handle language and control it well and usefully, than to be able to name the medial phoneme (a made-up term, not borrowed from linguistics, for which there is a perfectly normal phrase - middle sound)? In my mind this is soooo typical of how the National Curriculum has got it so wrong.

IMO good English is almost always straightforward. And I loathe jargon.

And that "unecessary" would be a typo and not my spelling, honest!

Lockets, can you explain why it is better to say "medial phoneme" than "middle sound" when "medial phoneme" is not actually a proper linguistic term and "middle sound" means the same thing? If I was a teacher I could meet the parents and say "I shall be referring to pencils as squirdlepoops" but it wouldn't make it a good idea would it?

That is absolutely mad . Your poor dd. I suppose the "o" sound , if also taken non-phonetically, could refer to the alternative phonemes such as "oa" and "o-e" and "e" as "ee" and "ea". However I don't expect my kids in their primary years to be bringing home worksheets which require degrees in Linguistics or new age academia to decipher. Sounds like the teacher is basically showing off - does she understand it I wonder or has she just printed it off and dished it out ? Ask her to explain it and see what happens - lol !!

'squirdlepoops' - LOL!

Can't believe I typed 'LOL' - when I joined Mumsnet I cringed at dh, ds and dd!

I was sure I posted on this thread (must be going mad!)

She must be young for her year - for what it's worth, I don't think any of the August babies in dd's class (she is August too) are doing joined up writing. Dd is still doing single letters and her teacher has told me not to rush her into joined up till she has mastered the letters properly.

Sounds like you have a lot of homework

I'm an english teacher and i've never even heard of it! and if i HAD i certainly wouldn't even make my secondary classes try to decipher it/use it/say it even. It's showing off and it's pretentious and it's entirely unnecessary. Teacher sounds young and inexperienced and regurgitating something she's heard on some fanny-arsed literacy course run by arsehole who can't teach, don't go into classrooms and haven't a clue, basically.