High frequency words

[PestoPenguin]

Can someone give me some advice on how to handle "tricky" and "high frequency" words with my reception-aged child. The school are teaching them to learn them by sight, but I know most are decodable, just not sounds they've been taught yet. Because of the books they are using these words creep up a lot. How can I help DD not to just guess them? She is excellent at decoding sounds she's been taught, but understandably struggles when words contain unfamiliar sounds.

I know lots of schools do still teach high frequency words in this way, I'm just interested to know what the phonics experts suggest or if there's an alternative approach.

Get her to look at the sounds in the words and explain the tricky part

Procedure
Explain that there are some words which have one or sometimes two tricky
letters in them.
Read the caption, pointing to each word, then point to the word to be learned
and read it again.
Write the word on the whiteboard.
Sound-talk the word, and repeat blending each sound to read the word.
Discuss the tricky bit of the word where the letters do not correspond to the
sounds the children know (e.g. in he, the last letter does not represent the same
sound as the children know in hen).
Read the word a couple more times and refer to it regularly through the day so
that by the end of the day the children can read the word straight away.

Thank you that's really helpful

Read the caption, pointing to each word, then point to the word to be learned

That doesn't really mean word to be learned, does it? It means sounds to be learned how to use, or something doesn't it?

I probably did it 'wrong' but I just went through them once a day with her and eventually she learned them, I found getting her to write them helped too so she learned to spell most of them as well. We didn't get any advice from the school on how they should be learned so I kind of did what I thought. We are still struggling with what when want at the moment tho.

Hi House,

I was asking a phonics advocate if she really meant "word to be learned," because the impression I've got from the advocates is that words shouldn't be learned but what should be learned is the procedure for learning to read words.

My own feeling is the whole thing is a bit of a non debate. I'm pretty sure that repetition, practice, supervision, joy of reading, being surrounded by books and so on and so on is what reading is about. I can't be persuaded that synthetic phonics analytic phonics, look and say, mixed methods or anything else is "the" answer to learning to read, because millions of people have learned to read using all of these methods and none of them!

Common sense tells me that reading, reading, practising and practising teaches both adults and children to read! The only "wrong" that makes any kind of sense to me is neglecting your children's reading. But these internal squabbles about this method or that method make no sense to me at all.

I guess as long as they read in the end makes no difference. I have noticed that the begining of the year she was trying to sound everything out (which can't be done on the sounds she had learned) and since learning to recognise the tricky words she does actually read better because she sees the tricky words in other words and can read them. Eg. She learned 'all' and that is in ball call etc so she doesn't try to sound them. But then is 'all' a sound in its own right?
I agree tho, reading lots and enjoying it does help and if they know it does it really matter how that came about?
Wish I could remember learning to read.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by sound in its own right. It's a combination of the sounds "oa" (as in boar) and "l". But, yes. It's a sound in its own right because it appears in lots of words. My daughter takes really well to combinations of sounds. I say what do you get if you put w in front of all? And she replies wall, and we repeat in will c, and t and so on and so on.

She calls it a guessing game. I don't really mind what she calls it, as long as she enjoys doing it.

What I mean is do they teach "all" as a sound like they would teach "or" as a sound.

al can represent the sound or so it is taught al (or) l