Confused at to why Reception DD is being taught letter names so soon after sounds?

[Owlelf]

DD is in reception. When she she knew a few letter sounds and could form a few letters. She seems to have progressed really well and knows all get letter sounds, is decoding words and writing captions. To be honest I am really impressed that she has come on so quickly and have to credit her teachers.

I am confused though, that her phonics group are now learning the names of the letters. This evening we read her school book and she seemed to be confusing the letter sounds and names. To my (completely untrained) mind it seems too soon to be confusing her with letter names when she has just learned (?learnt?) the sounds.

I realise I could broach this with her teacher, but would prefer not to as they must know what they are doing- not least given DDs progress so far under their wing.

She is working within stage 3 phonics BTW (her class is split into several groups for phonics, so not all children are learning letter names at the moment).

So I am really interested as to why, at this early stage the letter names are needed? Can anyone explain please?

Because in speech there are other clues ... tone of voice, facial expression, gestures so a single word has meaning unlike a written single word

Meh,

There's context. I've been thinking about this one a little bit. I mean, how likely is it that we're going to get confused?

I did ask you too write too on that board, not too. And you've gone and written too.

I had to contrive that example and I'm pretty sure context alone would differentiate.

There is absolutely no need whatsoever to have heterographs like there/their or know/no.

English has over 2000 words with different meanings and just one spelling (mean, lean, found, ground, sound, set, post, bar....) which never give any trouble to anyone. [In the US they conflated practice/practise to just practice and nobody is now even aware that they were ever different.]

The 253 sets of heterographs, like no/know are nothing but a device to make learning to read and write harder. Before Johnson's dictionary of 1755, people often spelt the same word differently, like we/wee in the 1611 bible.

Johnson thought it would be a shame to let those different spellings disappear and so he decided, wherever he could, to link them to different meanings.

The need for heterographs is disproved most strongly of all by English having just one spelling for 103 pairs of totally different words: read, lead, minute, second, tear, row...

learnandsay we aren't going to get confused if it is in context in a piece of text (we may if it is in isolation) because we read with a certain level of fluency but imagine you are a child or an adult with limited literacy skills. I know lots of adults who get confused with meaning even with context.

Some responses to Masha:
'English has over 2000 words with different meanings and just one spelling (mean, lean, found, ground, sound, set, post, bar....) which never give any trouble to anyone. [In the US they conflated practice/practise to just practice and nobody is now even aware that they were ever different.]'
Why would anyone in the USA be aware that 'they' were different when there's only one spelling? Surely, you mean that 'they' are no longer aware that there were two spellings of the one they've settled on?
You are of course right about there being lots of homonyms in the language. There are also lots of homophones, one reason no lesser figure than Noam Chomsky thought the spelling system perfectly suited to the spelling system of the language.
In actual fact, Dr Johnson was more concerned to show derivation, talking of which you would do well to re-read what he had to say about trying to 'fix' the spelling system. In his argument against the establishment of an academy on the French model, he said, 'The edicts of an English academy would probably be read by many, only that they might be sure to disobey them.'
The thing that puzzles me, Masha, is that, given how interested you are in the spelling system, instead of working from print to sound, you don't see the huge advantage there is in flipping the whole thing on its head and going from sound to print.

I think a great part of the reason children often seem unphased by our crazy habits in English spelling is because children can already speak English. So they already know quite a lot.

This morning I spent some time reading a book about the Ox Star to my little one. She agrees that the things that twinkle in the sky are written star

so I pronounced it s-t-a-rr because that's how it's written. And my 3yr old daughter laughed and replied we don't say s-t-a-rr we say staa

which is quite true. We do.

So I had another go with Australia which of course is written A-uu-s-t-r-a-le-i-a

But she insisted on calling it Australia. I kept on pointing out how it's spelled. And she said I know. But it's called Australia. So I asked her if she knew the only person in the world who calls it A-uu-s-t-r-a-le-i-a and she pointed at me and said you.

I don't really understand how they know what sounds are literal and what sounds aren't but they do seem to 'know' what's what.

Children in my class wouldn't say staa they would say star (you would hear the r at the end ) so s- t- ar makes perfect sense

'they already know quite a lot'
That's absolutely right, Learnandsay. All children grow up speaking their own language, which they learn naturally. Your daughter has it when she tells you the sounds in 'star' are 's' 't' 'aa'. What you need to say to her is: 'This,' pointing to the spelling, 'is the way we spell the sound 'aa' in this word.' After a while, when you have seen the spelling in lots of words - 'car', 'part', etc. - she'll process it and say 'aa' when she sees it.
'I don't really understand how they know what sounds are literal and what sounds aren't but they do seem to 'know' what's what.'
Mostly, the reason they 'get' it is because if you read 'twinkle, twinkle, little star' and you read the 'star' as 's' 't' 'a' 'r', it's so close to 'star' that the context helps. However, if the word isn't within the child's repertoire and the context is more difficult (technical, abstract, less frequently encountered), if the child has poor decoding skills, they might well not get it. Hence the need for accurate teaching.