Can any primary teachers or parents with similar experience please advise re phonics?

[Ophuchi]

DD is not yet of school age however she is picking up 'sight reading' very well. She also knows the letters of the alphabet (uppercase and lowercase) as Ay, Bee, Cee etc.

I gather from a quick look in the Education boards that this isn't necessarily a good thing, and that she would be much better off knowing the sounds that letters make before learning to blend words phonetically. Recently she has started to point out that 'Ay is for apple' and 'Zed is for Zebra' and so on.

Does it sound as if she is ready to learn phonics?

Should I begin to teach her at home or is this something best left to the professionals?

If you recommend teaching phonics to a toddler, what resources would you use?

Thanks in advance for replies.

For home use, try Jolly Phonics.

If she is genuinely interested in reading, then it is generally a good thing to build on it at her pace.

I think you need to get hold of a parent's guide and find out about the principles of the phonic approach - using the names of letters (eg "ay" or a short /a/ or "zed" for /z/ is not helpful (and some would say is actively harmful) in phonics, where you need to reproduce the sounds that letters represent in words. A good guide will explain this more clearly.

Ok, I'm an ex primary teacher and haven't taught infants for a great many years but...

-Yes to learning the sounds made by the letters instead of their names. Tbh, the names mean nothing and will not help with the development of reading. Learning the sounds made by each letter is far more productive and will eventually lead to your child being able to blend the sounds together to form words such as c-a-t; cat!

-If she points out that Ay is for apple I would just correct her by saying 'a' is for apple. You can help cement this by adding things like 'a' is also for ant. Then do stuff like walk around the house looking for other 'a' objects. But only if they begin with a soft 'a', not words like aeroplane.

-The Jolly Phonics website is a very good place to start. I think the website is jollylearning. You can buy the early phonic material from Amazon and ELC. They will help you with the hand and sound actions which accompany each sound.

-When considering phonics, it's good think in terms of the 44 sounds rather than 26 letters as this is (hopefully) how she will learn in school. You will also find that she may not start a,b,c but if she is doing JP, will start s,a, t, p, i, n.

-Think carefully whether she actually is ready. Children can learn letter names by rote at a young age yet not quite be ready to learn the sounds and move on to blending and segmenting them. No harm in doing the sound games though.

-As well as JP, have a look at the government stuff called Letters&sounds which is pretty much the same thing.

Thanks very much for your advice. DD loves stories, she loves to talk about the pictures, what the characters are doing/wearing etc.

Along side this she will ask what a word says and memorise it. She will then be able to identify that word in another book which she hasn't seen before. So she's not really reading but remembering a word as a picture.

I think we'll stick to the sound games just now as this seems like a very important pre-reading stage.

Thanks again.

If you look at letters and Sounds, the first couple of phases have some really nice 'general sound discrimination' games that are good for 'training the ear' even though they appear at first sight to have nothing to do with reading.

Orchard Toys have a game called 'Cock a doodle moo' which involves listening to farmyard sounds and is another fun sound game.

Thanks very much. I think she'd really enjoy cock a doodle moo :)

We had a really quite excesive large collection of Orchard Toys games when my children were preschoolers. DS would play Cock a Doodle Moo against himself for ages, and we played Bus Stop so often that all the different passengers had names and personalities....

That's brilliant. Yes, I think I'll have to invest in a few of these games myself to keep her entertained especially as DC2 on the way!

there are some good activities on the kent literacy website www.kenttrustweb.org.uk/kentict/content/games/literacy_menu.html though many will be too advanced for your daughter at present but some of them could be OK

Thanks very much, I'll take a look.

This is a wonderful board for supporting childrens' education. There are so many knowledgable people on here with great suggestions.

Also have a look at www.starfall.com 's ABC page. At the beginning of the section for each letter, it says the letter name, but from then on it is phonetic (if American!) This might be a good compromise for a child who already knows the letter names - deemphasise them from now on, but don't make her feel as though they are wrong; that might be confusing! (I think my DC taught himself to read from this site - at least, he used to love it, and he never had anything closer to instruction than this.)

Know its probably not very relevant at this stage but as they get older it is useful that they know tha 'a' can be 'ay' as well as 'aa' IYKWIM.

Lots of problems with DS wanting to say 'mad' when he sees the word 'made',

"but its 'm' 'aa' 'd' mummy!?"

"But sometimes 'a' is 'ay'"

English is a difficult language.

Thanks very much for suggestions. I've started to go about it by telling her that 'Ay says ah', Bee says b' (not buh) and she has grasped this very quickly, much in the same way that she knows 'cow says moo' and so on.

I seem to remember learning something called 'the magic e' as a child and little me thought this was a very logical way of changing a vowel sound so hopefully she will feel the same :)

It's the 'e' on the end which changes the /a/ sound to an /ay/ sound. If you can get him to understand the idea of letters 'working together' to spell a sound he should no longer find it a problem.

I think that in most of the phonics programmes this is taught after the teaching of vowel digraphs (two vowels together spelling on sound, e.g 'ay', 'ee', 'ou' etc. Once the idea of two letters spelling one sound is secure then the concept of 'split' digraphs (i.e where the vowel letters have a consonant between them) is easier to understand. It can be taught by using words such as 'mad'/'made', hop/hope and made visually explicit by linking the 'a' and the 'e' by drawing an 'arch' from the 'a' to the 'e' over the intervening consonant. (This was often taught as 'magic 'e', but I prefer to call it a 'split 'ay', or 'ee', or whatever it is as it keeps the 'connection between the two letters more clear)

The 'e' on the end of a word doesn't always indicate a 'split' vowel spelling, so don't call it a 'rule'! As children become more familiar with the idea of discrete letter combinations spelling more than one sound they become adept at trying all the 'sounds' they know if the word doesn't sound right the first time they decode it. So, for 'have', they would have to apply their knowledge that the 'e' on the end might be part of a split 'a', or it might be part of the /v/ spelling ('ve').

This is where non-decodable ORT books do so much damage because they introduce words which need this level of knowledge and flexibility far too early, before the children have reached this stage in their phonic knowledge and skills. Consquently the child is confused and often demoralised by the very real difficulty of reading words that they don't have the ability to work out.

The e on the end turning mad into made will be taught but not before a child has a full grasp of the 44 sounds. As well as single letter sounds such as 'a' these will include vowel diagraphs such as 'oa' as in boat and 'ai' as in rain. They will also learn that a hard 'A' sound can also be made with 'ay' as in hay not just with the magic e/holding hands letter or whatever your scheme calls it.
The 44 sounds also include 'sh', 'ch' and 'th'. Certainly young children pick up 'sh' and 'ch' very quickly and easily. If you are tempted to write out any of these words and you write out some 'sh' words then it helps if you write the 'sh' in a different coloured pen. This helps them see the 'sh' at the start of shop and the end of mash.

And yes, agree with Maizie that isn't not a rule . The English language is complicated and sticking to a synthetic phonics approach will allow children time to grasp the basics and not be confused by the more complex sight words.

Thank you both, some great advice and brilliant suggestions for the way forward there.

You've started correctly by pointing out the name of the letter and its sound. The graphemes and phonemes are usually taught in a specific way,so as not to confuse too much early on. And explain there are 'tricky' words that don't neccessarily follow the rules and just have to be learned.

I wouldn't bother about the letter names, they have no use at all in learning to read. Fine if your child knows them, but no need to practise them or draw any attention to them.

And explain there are 'tricky' words that don't neccessarily follow the rules

Please understand, there are no rules, only probabilities. It is the expectation that there should be 'rules' which makes phonics teaching incomprehensible to some people and seriously misleads children if they are taught that there are 'rules'.

'Tricky words' are just words which are taught early (far too early IMO) to enable more 'natural sounding' text to be written. They usually contain just one unusual letter/sound correspondence which has to be learned just like any other letter/sound correspondence. I don't personally agree with them, I think they cause more bother than they are worth and should be taught at the time that the 'tricky' correspondence they contain is being introduced..children would just have to put up with slightly unnatural sounding text for a bit longer.

Jamdonut, I have to disagree with you when you state that the OP has started correctly by pointing out the letter names and sounds.

For emerging readers only the sounds matter. And only the sounds should be taught. The letter names mean nothing and will do nothing to help a child learn to read.

I also think that tricky words are best left until a child has a good grasp of basic sounds.

From many years experience I would say some children (not all) who know letter names can have problems blending and segmenting (initially) and the problem seems to be more pronounced with spelling for writing ...
I don't have any problem with children learning "tricky words" as long as they are taught that the word isn't tricky just some letters and they are taught what it is. I do have a problem with telling them they have to be "learnt" as a whole.

I'll probably get shouted down for this, but on the advice of my DM (retired reception teacher) when DC started showing an interest in letters, sounds and 'reading' I introduced simple sentences.

If your DD can recognise her own name try a simple sentence like 'Mummy loves [DD's name]'. She'll soon pick up the words Mummy and loves.

Then you can start having fun with 'DD loves Mummy', 'I love DC', 'DC loves Daddy', 'DC loves apples'. Once she's got 'I' then you can introduce 'I am 3' etc. My DC - very different characters - both loved it when I gave them a bit of paper with two very simple sentences on for them to read and used to walk around the house with them reading it to anyone who'd listen. Of course they weren't 'reading' properly, but they were definitely learning the words - and they loved it!

They have to know their phonics to sound out words they don't know yet, but a lot of reading is about whole word recognition - like 'the'. Introducing 'the' early lets them read all sorts of simple sentences too.

Have fun!

Many thanks for all your replies. It's rained all day here in Scotland and DD has been quite happily asking about what sounds all the letters make after I introduced her to the initial three. She is very quick for her age and picking it up with no problems.

Shame it's far too wet to go to the park though as that beats letters hands down in little one's opinion!

Thanks again to you all. I now have an idea of the best way to proceed as I was pretty clueless before (obviously - telling her letter names!) but I didn't expect that I'd need to know anything about teaching reading for a while yet.

One more question though, when she asks what a word says, should I spell it out phonetically?

Thanks for the alternative view Culturemulcher. She's picking up reading by word recognition very quickly and having lots of fun but at the moment has no idea about sounding out a word the way you and I would if we came across something foreign to us.

This isn't a problem just now but if she's still doing the same at 5 then learning to read phonetically might be difficult for her. I just want to help her along as best I can so I think it'd be better for her if she could read both ways, phonetically and the way that's come naturally to her.

It is impossible to stop a young child learning and in truth some children will pick up reading very easily just from exposure to words and books however even for these children phonics is a useful tool.

If she is asking what words say then she definitely seems ready to learn to read. I think you should always tell her what the word says, regardless of whether it is phonetically decodable. If it's a word like, umbrella, I'd say the word then say it again breaking up the syllables so um-bre-lla. Point to each part as you say it. If they word is more tricky such as, enough, I'd sound it out the same but just explain that sometimes different letters can be put together to make different sounds. I wouldn't confuse her by then going on to try and teach her about 'ough'. I'd just tell her that some words are trickier and she'll learn about those soon. But always tell her what the word says.

Incidently, some synthetic phonic schemes do run their set of 'tricky' words alongside the phonic teaching. Jolly Phonics is one of them. If you find that your DD is very quickly picking up sight words you have read to her then she sounds as if she would cope fine with learning her phonemes alongside some tricky words. It would confuse many children which is why it isnt recommended but many bright, able early readers cope fine with this approach.

Look on Amazon for the JP tricky words and the hat to place them on. You start with the blue words and work through.