Help with phonics

[AuntieBulgaria]

Hullo, DD is starting reception in September. She has recently started trying to read things by herself by sounding out the letters. I want to support her but am worried about giving her 'bad' info. Or not actually knowing how to explain.

She was trying to read the word 'alien' in the back of the car the other day but she is used to A making the sound 'ah' (well not ah but you know what I mean, not ay).

Forgive me for being totally dim but why is it 'ay' in alien and age? Is it what I would have called - 'the magic 'e'? Is that what's called a split diagraph?

I read the guide to phonics that DD's school issues and it says that at school they are not given books to read with phonemes they haven't learnt yet but DD is just trying to give it a go with everything she comes across.

What should I say when the word she is reading does something unfamiliar?

Some times she can work it out - she read and blended 'like' as luh i ck eh but then said 'like' because she could make it make sense in the context I suppose.

Thanks maverick for the schwah link. Although talking terminology, I always associate them with Rave ( misspent youth emoticons)

Does how children talk, and their accents change the way they learn phonics? Going back to the bath v barth, path v parth, would it be confusing for a child if the ready of their class spoke in a different way to them?

If the child pronounces the in bath as "ar" then that is how they should be taught whereas here in the north we say bath.

Even Letters & Sounds has north/south pronunciations included

Who says barth? I've heard of baath, (snooty people.) I've heard of bath rhymes with American-math, Geordies. But barth is a new one to me.

Thanks mrz I am a Londoner but my parents aren't , so I have an estuary accent with northern vowel sounds. dd is a Londoner but has picked up my accent \ vowel way of speaking, . So she says bath where her peers say Barth. I suppose I just mention this to the teacher. To her Yorkshire fathers shame she also says miwlk for milk and wawter for water. I suppose London teachers will be used to that though.

You need to extend your circle of acquaintances

I thought bath in Esturian was baaf.

I grew up in Romford learnandsay so I suppose it must be the result of the cockney/Essex that is Estuary? Definate "r" in it , like bar, where we go for our Babyshams.

I expect you are right learnandsay

An acquaintance says "barf"

I grew up in north Essex and I still say 'barth' (and 'carstle' and 'grarss' etc.), despite more years than I care to say living in Yorkshire and County Durham. Phonics isn't elocution. You teach to the accent. That's why all English speaking people can read and understand the same words despite pronouncing them very differently.

This, incidentally, is the prime reason why Masha's spelling campaign won't work - nobody would agree on which accent to respell to...

I say barth. If I said baath it would have a very long baa in the middle in the way of a sheep.

Am Northern but never sounded like it. Which is just one of those odd things I suppose.

There are a group of key words including, 'have' 'no' 'the' 'me' 'she' 'so' 'go'
which may be learnt through a look and say method because they do not fit easily into the phonic scheme, but are essential in the early stages of reading. Children learn to recognise them as whole words through matching games and flashcard practise, rhyming words may be learnt as a set, such as the group of ay words ; say, day, way. As for the word ALIEN,Auntie Bulgaria, I would say use the familiar sounds to build up the word as your DD has done but if it doesn't sound right try an alternative so 'Ah lien sounds wrong try Ai next. Context and familiar patterns in writing help too. There is nothing wrong in supplying the word for your DD the first time she meets it in a book and explain how you were able to read it yourself, sometimes children will get mired in trying to sound out every word and lose the sense of the story. Hope this helps and does not confuse you more.

Why nymac?

Not sure I understand the question mrz.

"Children learn to recognise them as whole words through matching games and flashcard practise" Why?

Once learnt, key words, which make up a large percentage of reading can be used alongside decoding and phonics to help children make sense of the written word. I think it is useful to have a number of methods to draw on. They are not mutually exclusive. I am a bit new to posting so very s.l.o.w.

Why not just teach the children to decode the words

I think it is useful to have a number of methods to draw on

Not for the fifth of children who are actually confused by mixed methods, nymac.

I think because there are about 12 Key words which need to be learnt at an early stage and perhaps decoding 'she' and 'go' is more difficult than learning these words as a special set. I think writing this has made me think 'she' could easily be decoded into the phonemes and the alternative sound for
I may have talked myself out of my original theory. Thanks mrz

So if you teach a child that the letter in the word he spells "ee" they can then decode me, she, we, be and if you teach them that the letter spells "oa" in so they can read no, go, so and if you teach than the sound "v" can be written they can read have and give

Feenie where is your evidence for claiming a fifth of children are confused by mixed teaching methods. I think for some children, an aural approach may not work and they may be able to recognise wordshape or context. Think of the children who learn to read words in their environment like EXIT, McDONALDS, and ARIEL while still toddlers. They learn them through familiar context, shape and repetition and not through sounding out.

Mrz do you specifically teach a child that v can also be ve (as in have, give etc)?

20% of children leave primary school unable to read to the required standard, and most schools have been using the methods you describe since the introduction of the Literacy strategy.

In synthetic phonics schools, no one is left unable to read.

In the Jolly Phonics work books, they still talk about "Magic e" changing the sound to the name.

It is very confusing for parents trying to help their children to learn to read.

DD has - thanks to the Jolly Phonics work book - taken on board magic e very readily. Does not seem to be causing her problems yet but how very annoying.

On a slightly different note and going back to the original point of the thread, the best thing I did was to buy the Julia Donaldson songbird phonics series. There are about eight books at each level and they are purely phonetic so that you go for quite a long way without meeting for example said (they use phonetic says) or even the. They gave my DCs so much confidence because they could actually read whole books. By the time they got to level four or five they were so familiar with the basic phonics rules that they then picked up the non phonetic stuff in the buff and chip books ( where we went back down a couple of levels to cover off the vocab) really quickly.