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.

Oh dear...only following what I've been told to do!! And it's in 'Letters and Sounds'. As children move up the school,spelling is done by letter names. I've had children query what a letter is because they only know the sound.

Using letter names to spell is a "convention" but isn't actually useful if you are trying to work out how to spell an unfamiliar word. We use sounds even in Y6. However the OPs child hasn't even started school so it is a long time before she needs worry about how spelling is done as she moves up the school.

But equally, early 'sight word reading' may have only a short term advantage and the child start struggling without a good grounding in phonics.

I don't really rate Jolly Phonics. I taught DD to read this summer (she has turned three this month), mostly at her instigation.

She loves alphablocks on cbeebies website, you can get every episode on the website.

Also the BBC letters & sounds DVD which she loves.

Our local library has some Read & Write inc books which are good.

We have a magnetic board and letters. We did lower case first and then introduced capitals when we read books the sentances start with a capital, and so every few words I was having to say 'This is a huh' or whatever

I did get some phonics books from Amazon - some alphablocks books because she loves them and Songbirds which are lovely and 100% decodeable, ie no tricky words and written by Julia DOnaldson of Gruffalo fame.

She can do all 42 sounds and blend cvc/ccvc words and do some tricky words eg I/the/go etc...

It's totally do-able with a younger child if they are interested. Concentration span is also an issue!

Songbirds do contain "tricky" words but I agree they are a fun scheme that engages young readers

Ah ok, obviously not been paying enough attention though we only have the llevel one books. They are a million times more fun than Biff, Chip and blinkin' Kipper.

The tricky word frequency then must be lower than the new ORT decodable books because when we read those I am forever saying 'this is a tricky word....'

"tricky" words are words such as I, the, was, me, he, she, said, you ...
what the old ORT Biff, Chip et al introduce are decodable but impossible for the child to read at that point words like aeroplane ...

Thank you for your replies, you've all been very helpful.

mrzThu 27-Oct-11 10:50:02
Using letter names to spell is a "convention" but isn't actually useful if you are trying to work out how to spell an unfamiliar word. We use sounds even in Y6.

So when you get onto the digraphs do you teach them that "pp" plus "hh" makes "ff" or do you say "Pee" plus "aitch" makes "ff" ?

I teach them the two letters together as a unit represent the phoneme I don't say and make and I don't say pee and aitch

We teach the first digraphs in the second week of reception so children readily accept that phonemes can be written with one, two, three or even four letters.

Thanks Mrz you are fabulous.
On a slightly different note, SD learnt the "alphabet song" at nursery, (along with Jolly Phonics) and he was convinced that there was a letter called "elemenopee"

[hgrin] well you know yourself how you improvise with song lyrics ... (well I do [hblush] )