Phonics for dummies?

[lunar1]

My DS is 3.3 and will be starting prep school nursery after Easter. I went into the school today for a meeting with the teacher and other parents. Though most of the time will be learning through play, they will be introduced to phonics from the start and we have been asked to support this at home.

I am dyslexic and was flash-carded to death as a child, I never understood any language rules as a child. I don't remember ever being taught them at school. I was kept in a special group where we did spellings all the time! It didn't work, I still cant spell and it was probably just dumb luck that I ever managed to read in the end.

I did OK in the end, got a good degree and have had a professional job. I would however like my children to have a less stressful time learning to read than i did. I have read to DS and his baby brother every day of their lives. He knows the alphabet, all the letter names and most of the sounds. He loves to look at books, and when we are out he will read out the letters on posters, usually the letter names rather than the sounds though.

I tried reading up on phonics several times to see how i could help him. I have a dvd with the full alphablocks series on it because in all honesty I didn't know the phonetic sounds and after watching them I realise i have been saying some of them wrong! Since watching the DVD a few times he has started to associate the sounds with objects and will say b for ball, b, b, b etc.

My problem is that all the other parents seemed to have full understanding of the phonics scheme, everyone was prattling on about how they were blending words with their children and how they were starting to read on their own. I don't want to let my DS down by not understanding the concept of the phonics system. Can anyone point me to a really basic guide with the different stages. I would like to at least get to grips with it myself before I have to help DS with it.

Thank you for reading if you got to the end!

www.phonicsinternational.com/
jollylearning.co.uk/overview-about-jolly-phonics/
www.sounds-write.co.uk/docs/sounds_write_leaflet_for_yr_parents.pdf
www.sounds-write.co.uk/docs/sounds_write_common_spellings_of_the_consonants_and_vowels.pdf

Hi, my dh can't do phonics either. He was only taught capital letters at school and is totally baffled by anything else.

You shouldn't feel guilty because you don't know phonics. I bet half of it is playground politics. There is a woman in my dd's class who you can't breathe in and out next to without her turning it into a point scoring exercise.

"of course Chantelle is top of the class for breathing in and out. She has to hold her breath for 26 minutes at swimming and she doesn't breathe at all on her horse, and she only breathes in, never out, at basketball as her trainer says this is best and she was breathing already in the womb"

At age 3 I think he is doing well to know b

Savoycabbage, that is exactly what this meeting was like, three women were doing it. I felt like they should be helping their children with their UCAS forms and just skip the first 13 years of education as they obviously don't need it!

Thank you for the links Mrz, its much better than trawling through the endless google results I have been getting.

I wont push my children, but i am having to watch my mum and stop her from teaching DS, she brags about how i could 'read' at a year old. she used to drill me with flash cards constantly, it was never ending. She is completely unable to see how this prevented me from actually learning how to read for myself, and ultimately held me back. I think my teachers thought I could read because I had been trained to know so many words, it was only towards the end of primary school that they realised i didn't have a clue.

It also depends which phonics "system" the school uses because you might well teach them incorrectly and he will have to relearn. We didn't "do" phonics at home at all until ds started nursery at pre-prep he is now in year 1 and excels at reading - the school will know what they are doing

I would let yourself be led by your DS. It will be great for his self esteem if he can "teach" you phonics. Your experience learning to read is exactly why the best schools don't teach reading by mixed methods any more.

Have a look at Debbie Hepplewhite's Teeny Reading Seeds -it's perfectly appropriate for pre-schoolers and written by a synthetic phonics reading expert too -and it's free:

Teeny Reading Seeds www.phonicsinternational.com/trs.html Free resources for approximately 3-4 yr.olds as they begin to make links between speech sounds and the 26 alphabet letters - both upper and lower case: can be used with the DfE programme Letters & Sounds Phase One

I agree with letting yourself by guided by your son.

I am keenly aware that most parents (and quite a few teachers) don't understand what 'phonics' means. This is partly because advocates of SP now use the term not just for teaching basic letter - sound patterns (as the term was previously used) but include alternative pronunciations for graphemes and variant spellings for sounds as well.

I tried to explain the English spelling system on the thread Phonics - basics on this forum. It got severely diluted by the advocates of SP who disapprove of my attempts to provide an objective description of the English spelling system. I'll paste in a few on my posts from it, in the hope that u might find them useful.

Words are made up of sounds which are blended together: cat is a blend of C ? A - T.
Some sounds are spelt with just one letter, as in ?cat?, others with two or three (ch, igh). The different spellings for sounds are collectively known as ?graphemes?.

For reading, children have to learn to sound out the graphemes and to blend them into words.
For writing, they learn to break words up into their constituent sounds and what letters to use for them.

Most European languages have around 40 sounds.
English has 43 ½ sounds . (The ½ sound is the unstressed, barely audible, variously spelt vowel which occurs mainly in endings, such as ?flatten, certain?, but can be elsewhere in a word too (decide, invite, abandon).

The 43 main English sounds (in alphabetical order) are as follows (illustrated with the words in brackets).
a (ant) ai (rain) air (air) ar (arm) au (autumn)
b (bed) ch (chip) d (dog)
e (egg) ee (eel) er (herb)
f (fish) g (garden) h (house) i (ink) -igh (high) j (jug)
k (kite) l (lips) m (man) n (nose) -ng (ring)
o (on) -oe (toe) oi (oil)
oo (food) oo (wood)
or (order) ou (out)
p (pin) r (rug) s (sun) sh (shop) t (tap)
th (this) th (thing)
u (up) -ue (cue) v (van) w (window) y (yak) z (zip)
zh (spelt mostly -si-) (television)

Because some English sounds are spelt differently in different positions of words (may, make) or are spelt differently for other reasons (kick, comic),
the basic English spelling system uses 81 graphemes:
a (ant) ai (rain plate play) air (air) ar (arm) au (sauce saw)
b (bed) ch (chip stitch) d (dog)
e (egg) ee (eel funny) er (herb)
f (fish) g (garden) h (house)
i (ink) igh (by bite) j (jug bridge oblige)
k (c/at/ot/ut crab/ clap kite/kept comic pick seek/ risk quick fix)
l (lips) m (man) n (nose) ng (ring)
o (pot want quarrel) oe (toe bone old) oi (coin toy) oo (food) oo (wood)
or (order wart quarter more) ou (out now)
p (pin) r (rug) s (sun face) sh (shop station musician) t (tap delicate)
th (this) th (thing) u (cup) ue (cue cube) v (van have) w (window) y (yak)
z (zip) -si- (television)

There are also:
8 main endings ( doable, fatal, single, ordinary, flatten, presence, present, other),

2 main prefixes (decide, invite)

and consonant doubling for showing that a vowel is short rather than long (dinner ? diner).

The first thing I started doing properly with DD (she had already learned letter names but that was from a very annoying computer toy, not intentional) was I-spy - just using sounds instead of letter names. So "something beginning with mmmmm" rather than the letter name m.

Thank you for all the information. I like the idea of being guided by DS, the info you have posted is brilliant marsha it just makes learning to read look so complicated. I am hoping that it's one of those things that seems really difficult before you start but then becomes obvious once we get going.

I am glad people mentioned that there are different methods used for phonics, i thought it was all the same thing.

As DS already knows the names of the letters i would like to help him get the single letter sounds to go with them, so far he can match up about 9 letters to their sounds. I have used one of the above links to listen to the pronunciation to make sure I get it right. Does this sound like it is a good idea?

The basics of phonics is the same whatever programme the school uses (the order the letters are taught may differ slightly but fundamentally they are the same) what masha has posted is

It's good to here that the order of learning varies Mrz, so far the letter sounds he knows relate to toys and people.

Lunar
I am sorry that what I have posted makes learning to read look complicated.
In English, it is. But most children manage to get there in the end, even if the going gets hard at times, although some children learn remarkably easily.

Phonics is only a relatively small part of learning to read. An important one. Especially for the consonants. But the main part is imprinting all common words on our memory with repeated practice, so that we recognise them instantly, without the need for decoding.

With reading and writing, only practice makes perfect. We keep paying some attention to individual letters, but as fluent readers we mainly register words as wholes and even type and write automatically. The final aim of literacy learning is that. And there are different ways of getting to that stage.

Lunar - I'm not a teacher (DH is, but secondary, so also not involved with teaching phonics), so am not writing this from that perspective - rather am looking at this as a parent of a child currently learning to read.

When someone lists it all out, it looks mega complicated. But what's not being taken into account is how flexible 4 year olds are, and how easily they (usually) take to new ideas.

I have a 4 year old (July birthday) who started school only recognising a couple of letters (O and I). He has really enjoyed the phonics teaching - they have done 4 sounds a week so is really getting it quickly. They learn with actions as well as the sounds - for him, that really suits his way of learning and has made him pick it up very quickly.

Yes things can have different spellings for the same sound (squeeze, bean, me) or vice versa, but to him that just means different possibilities to sound out and see if it fits in the context. It's honestly not the big deal I could have worried about. I know my son has taken to it well but really, don't worry about your DS and a big daunting list of sounds - he won't see it like that. At that age learning should be (and usually is) fun. Don't waste money on things when there are great free resources (the jolly phonics website is good) and the chances are your son will also pick it up well anyway.

Grubbalo
I agree with almsot every word u say.
The most reliable predictor of literacy success is parental interest and support. I am sure that the parents who post on or peruse this forum do pretty well in this area -reading to their children, playing language games and helping with reading and spelling homework, as well as ensuring that it gets done.

My main aim by posting on here is to demystify the teaching of reading and writing and also to help parents to understand why learning to read and English to a fairly basic level takes nearly three times longer than other European languages.

English spelling is comparatively chaotic, with 80 spelling patterns having alternatives and 69 spellings having more than one pronunciation (as I have shown on a couple of my blogs). But the majority of difficulties are caused by just 15 spelling inconsistencies, such as for long oo, ee, and o.

Reading progress is most impeded by just 5 graphemes:
** : read (152/ee/) - (63/e/, 3/ai/ - e.g. read, great)

• • : lost (375 /o/) - (23 /o-e/, 41 /u/ - e.g. most, month)
• *: bone (170 /o-e/) - (13/u/, 11 /oo/ e.g. done, move)
• • : sound (74 /ou/) - (15 /u/, 12 /oo/- e.g. southern, soup) ** : row (36 /ou/) - (31 /o-e/ or -o/ - e.g. row boat slowly)

(The numbers in brackets show in how many common words they have their main sound and also in how many their most common other sounds).

is bit tricky too (man, many, apron). Especially for speakers of standard English (ask, answer). The overlaps between ei and ie are not very helpful either (porkie, pie - weight, height - fierce pliers).

The consonants are mostly not tricky at all.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Thank you for all the replies, they are really helpful.

Marsha, are you a teacher? I wasn't kidding when i said i needed phonics for dummies. I feel more mystified than ever before!

Masha is a literacy researcher according to her blog and has worked as a secondary teacher. Her lists and ideas aren't widely supported by those working with young children

I regret to say, lunar1, that if you take any notice of masha you'll be in a perpetual state of mystification!

Stick with the links mrz posted earlier. They'll tell you all you need to know

Returning to this thread to thank you all so much for your help on my thread and all the others I have been trawling through. I spent time going through lots of the links and various threads. Since there were so many recommendations for the songbird books i bought them just after i started this thread, more for me than DS at this stage!

Of course after reading through the first few books phonics seems to make complete sense all of a sudden, at least for the simple words. I now feel very reassured that I will be able to support my boys in learning to read.

I really can't thank you all enough, before I started this thread I was absolutely terrified of phonics. Yesterday I showed DS1 the first book, top cat. he managed to sound out all the letters properly and I encouraged him to sound them quicker and quicker, which he thought was hysterical. after a couple of minutes he was recognising the words he was sounding out. I got the same book out today and he did really well with it.