Don't you feel the burning excitement of competition of the phonics check?

[flexybex]

We're now introducing a Y1 equivalent of KS1 SATS/ KS2 SATs / 11+/ GCSEs / A levels for mummies to tutor for / compete / crow about.

God help us over the next few years.

"Sure, Indigo. I've got no problem with that. But if someone stands in the middle of a classroom and says, now children write me a word that rhymes with feather and describes a male lamb with no testicles I'm pretty sure none of the children will come up with anything because there's a lot going on there which has nothing to do with how the lamb sounds, --- like the children don't know what a wether is, (or what testicles are.)"

Nobody, nobody, nobody can write a plausible word (a signifier) if they don't have a concept of the signified (in your case a lamb who will never experience the joy of fatherhood).

However, anyone with a grounding in phonics can make a plausible attempt at reading any word. They would then be taught that x word is irregular.

I think 'tear' has the sound in my accent

people often find me hard to understand

Although I'm probably wrong. Does it have the sound?

The tear (as in torn) is "air" and the tear (sob) is "eer"

I'm in Hants, we have it as mrz describes.

Accent can slightly change the way we say the sound.

I pronounce 'eer' and 'air' the same.

beer or bear ? deer or dare? here or there?

Yes. They all rhyme to me.

hair and here?

Yes, they rhyme

as does woman and women totally giving away my accent

But I just asked my kids - and they don't rhyme when they say them

I remember having a long conversation with someone about 'pair programming' and they thought I was talking about 'peer programming'. 'twas embarrassing.

But not as embarrassing as when I asked how to check-in my work and everyone was too embarrassed to ask me why I was asking about chickens

my OH says heed for head and cooch for couch

LOL indigo!

I think when spelling with phonics that they aren't just used in isolated blocks. Take the word story, when a child first spells it they may come up with storee, but as they learn more phonics they realise that actually often when there is an ee sound at the end of the word it is written with the y phonic representing ee. DS2 has only learnt phonics no look and say, and his spelling (in reception) for new words is already way better than his brother's in year 5, especially when it comes to working out new words, or words he may not have seen written down very often. Through the year I have seen an improvement already in him being able to choose the write phoneme by choice, eg in December he was writing caik, now he knows that a-e is more likely in words like cake, take, make etc so he spells it correctly as 'aik' doesn't appear often in english.

Ok, I just did last years sample phonics chech with DD

She got 21 out of 40.

:( :( :(

Indigo I think it's more useful if you use it as a diagnostic and look at which words she got wrong and work on those phonemes rather than see it as a pass /fail.
www.theliteracyblog.com/ Phonics food for thought

Problem is mrz - I'm not teaching her to read. School are.

(I'm reading with her every day - but not teaching her to read)

There is no way I believe she is a level 2b. School are still lying to me. and I'm the stupid mug for briefly believing them.

I have to get her out of there. But I can't find someone to tutor her during the day.

I need to find a trained teacher to tutor her for an hour a day - during school hours. And I don't know how to find one.

Or rather I don't trust any teachers anymore so I don't know how to find one I could trust.

21/40 is fecking awful. Yes she could have got more right if I'd said 'try again' but again that's not the point. The point is she can't read.

I wish I could help

Me too. Was it mainly section 2 that she was getting wrong?

No. Of the words she got right half were real words and half weren't. And half were from section 1 and half from section 2.

Although tbh I've just read with her (we read one page of a chapter book every night) and she's not at her best at all. So I guess who knows how many she would have got right if I'd caught her at a different time.

Either of you want a holiday in London over summer :)

Where is the sample test from last year?

Here

@ Indigo

Just looked at the sample phonic thing- I read chom ( which should presumably be like chomp) as com- like the ch in chord. Were there any like that in the test this year?

There were a couple which had more than one plausible pronunciation - but we were allowed to accept any phonetically plausible answer. You would have got 'chom'.