A fuss about phonics? Am I too picky?

[curlytoes]

I love my 3 year olds preschool. The staff are friendly, welcoming and really seem to care about the children. There are lots of fun play choices and my ds has settled in quickly, (which for him is especially great). The thing which is bugging me is that they have a 'letter of the week', which I think they teach in a counterproductive and ill informed way. (I was an early years teacher myself so I guess I'm a nightmare parent!) I would rather he didn't learn his letters/ letter sounds at all than pick up bad habits. He is obssessed with anything the preschool teachers say, and treats it as absolute gospel. So should I say something and risk looking picky and a pain in the butt?

(ps apologies in advance if I disappear. My ds2 is sleeping now but ill with flu, dh is at work and ds1 is hyper as we've been stuck in all weekend. I will appreciate any advice when I do get back to the pc).

DS went to a pre-school which taught phonics in an entirely different way to the way his school teaches it. So it was a question of unlearning and relearning. Only took him a few weeks to adapt to the "new" way though.

I tend to adopt the go with the flow approach and unless the pre-school were actively teaching something "wrong" I'd accept that there are many methods to teach phonics ...

Message withdrawn

So what it is it you don't like? Do they teach the letter name rather than the sound or the capital rather than the lower case letter?

I'm not sure it really matters unless it is total wrong - learning A and the name will not stop them learning a and the sound - and at some stage they make the link themselves.

Hi Curly, hope ds2 is up and about soon.

These days children at 3/4 are surrounded by many different things teaching them lettrs/phonics. Toys, games, programmes etc and they rarely adopt the same method. I had this concern with dd3 and the way I dealt with it was to point out at the start that letters can be big or little and that they have sounds and names and that it's the sounds that we use most of the time to work out what a word says and sort of explained that the alphabet is a bit funny and has rules that it sometimes likes to break such as c sometimes being soft and so on and I would point this out as we went along for example if we were looking at a word that had a silent letter. This approach has worked for us and she hasn't got confused when she's come across something that goes against what she had previously thought was set in stone as it were.

I know I'm v. late back to the discussion, (poorly DS2 and his manic brother have been keeping me busy). I just wanted to post thanks for your messages. In answer to Jicky's Q, My DS1s preschool has different adults doing the input with the kids on different days. Some adults use capital letters, some lower case, some talk about the letter name, some the sound. Today DS1 came home convinced a letter d was the number 6! I don't really think the preschool have thought about it much which would be a hanging offence in a school. None the less it is not the most important thing and I think I'll try to chill out. I am beginning to realise that I do have a tendancy to be a control freak, (not the nicest quality)!

but a d does look like 6 just the other way round, and D looks like an 0, a M looks like a W ... kids will make these connections, they aren't fixed into how they look at letters and numbers yet. I'm not sure preschool can do "harm" by not being utterly consistent, the world isn't utterly consistent.
Educationalists may recommend kids learning lower case letters first but road signs, shop names etc are mostly in upper case only , so a lot of the environmental reading a small child does is upper case. Buses often mix letters and number on route names, and which of us would always say " thats not our bus number and letter, thats a Buh 1, we want a Tuh 3" nope, we say bus number B1 or T3. environmental reading again.