"ou" understanding the different sounds ou can make?

[atiredmum]

Do you teach should, could etc as "ou" making a different sound as in

ou = ou t

and

ou = s ou p

What year?

hi maizie I totally agree with you there, I don't think the school have a clue what they're doing.
Poor phonic decoder came from the head when I requested a meeting recently. I wanted an explanation why ds2 is 10.6 with a reading age of 14.4 and a spelling age of 7.8... Ds2 wasn't taught phonics at infant level,(different school) the last 3 yrs he's been on Units of sound, now this... still no improvement. Any help or suggestions gratefully received

have printed it off and stuck it in his book (over the RWI one ) ((eeek))
Thankyou mrz

It's a pleasure, Ingles2. Tell us if it works - that's the proof of the pudding.
I don't know RWI very well but I'm sure you can trust what maizieD says on the subject.

Reading thread with interest as battling poor spelling. I have resorted to teaching 'could' as - if 'u' forget the 'u' in could, you'll get a cold cod......

I went to a pub quiz once where they asked what the 11 different sounds were for ou.

It was the only question I could answer amongst the soaps and football questions although I could answer another teams tie-breaker which was 'what were baby rabbits called?'

I'm sat here with the spelling chart looking for "a" as "o" sound
Ingles,
Even if u have that on a chart, it will only help with learning to read and not all words (was, want, wash - wag, swam, swag).

Reading is largely a matter of recognition, and knowing the main possible sounds for a grapheme like ou (touch, group, mould...) can help a little with getting to the words, especially as context always helps too, and the spellings for consonants are fairly stable. It's mainly the vowels that are tricky. So it's only parts of words which are troublesome.

For spelling, charts are of much less use, especially for the vowels.
The spelling of the /ou/ sound does not have many exceptions and is therefore not too bad
(Crowd, powder. Coward.
Brown, clown, crown, down, drown, frown, gown, town.
Fowl, growl, howl, owl, prowl, scowl, towel.
Flower, power, shower, tower.

Browse, drowse. Bough, plough.)

• Although ow is tricky to read (blown down).

The spellings with lots of alternatives in lots of words, such as the long /oo/ with in 93 words, two or more spellings in 8 (e.g. to, too, two) and several others in 85 (blue shoe flew through...) take the longest to learn.

Because the spelling of long /oo/ is so variable, children have to learn how to spell it in each of the 186 words with that sound one by one.
They learn them a few at a time, grouped in various ways, but in the end it comes down to having to learn how to spell that sound in each of them.

(U can see them all on my websigte and blog.)

The spellings for /oo/ are among the trickiest, but /ee/ is worse (seek, bleak, even, believe...see, me, ski...) and several others are pretty horrid too (stole coal bowl...; late, straight, eight), with consonant doubling the most random of all (rabbit habit, copy poppy, muddy study....).

Masha Bell

I don't think the school have a clue what they're doing.
I'll let u into a little secret:
NOBODY REALLY DOES.

Everybody agrees that it's best to start simply, with the likes of 'a cat sat on a mat', to give children the basic idea of what letters do and how they are used, and that teaching should move on to the trickier bits gradually, but at a fairly good pace, in regular daily doses

But beyond these basics which apply roughly for the first year of learning to read and write, there are very few certainties and little agreement, other than that it takes a lot of time, perseverance and patience.

Beyong the basic stage, children learn to read and write by doing lots of reading and writing. And if it wasn't for the complexities of English spelling, it would not be problematic at all.

Ingles2, I don't think the head really has much idea of your son's difficulties if he thinks it is 'poor phonic decoding'. Decoding is for reading, which your son seems to be rather good at. You have also shown that your son is capable of coming up with phonically plausible spelling - just not the correct spelling. The Ruth Miskin chart sounds like a basic tool to get beginners started, but your son is no longer a beginner. Even having a chart where every spelling variation is listed only gives the possibilities, it doesn't inform the writer of the correct spelling for every word. I suppose that would be a dictionary!

What your son needs now is more detailed help to make spelling seem less random. I have no knowledge of Units of Sound but would have thought it a programme that works on that kind of thing. A book aimed a poor spellers in secondary school, which might help your son, is Joy Pollock's Signposts to Spelling. It is quite old but reasonably priced copies sometimes come up on Amazon.

I don't think the school have a clue what they're doing.
I'll let u into a little secret:
NOBODY REALLY DOES.

untrue masha ... you continually try to make English appear more complicated than it is ... yes English has a opaque orthographical system and isn't so simple as other languages but it is understandable if one takes the time

Thankyou again everyone for your help.. and apologies OP for gatecrashing your thread.
CecilyP Thankyou, you have hit the nail exactly on the head...trying to go back to beginning is just confusing him... and the schools insistence on using this chart to spell is crazy. Ds2 has a huge vocabulary, he wants to write / spell complex words..he is not attempting to spell 'the cat sat on the mat'...
I'm off to hunt amazon for your recommendation now... thanks again.

Mrz
English has a opaque orthographical system and isn't so simple as other languages but it is understandable if one takes the time

The fact that learning to read and write English takes much longer than any other European language - three years for minimal competence instead of one year or less (Seymour et al, 2003) - is itself proof that English literacy acquisition is exceptionally difficult. We all take longer to learn difficult skills than easy ones. I have merely identify the spellings which are responsible for the difference.

The main English spelling patterns, such as 'make - may' are understandable. The exceptions (break, straight, eight.... they, weigh..) are simply random. It is an apologist lie to claim that they are understandable.

For spelling, they simply have to be memorised word by word, without rhyme or reason. They follow no pattern or rule which children can learn. They can be put into little groups for learning, but they are not understandable.

Many of them are like that for totally stupid reasons, like typesetting errors which have been enshrined in dictionaries. Pretending that English spelling is understandable is a nasty way of making poor spellers feel stupid. The spellings are stupid, not the spellers.

Oh here we go, more nasty insinuations from masha, first that the teaching professionals giving advice on this message board don't understand the code or how to teach it, and now that we think poor spellers are stupid

Bloody hell, Masha, you have finally lost it this time!