So what to do if you can't do phonics yourself?

[Havering]

My name is Havering and I hate phonics, they are my personal equivalent of tongue twisters .... Ah nice to get that out in the open

As I read a huge amount both professionally and for pleasure I am obviously capable of reading. But now by DC are learning to read I have discovered I really don't "get" phonics. I'm sure I pronounce them wrong when they are standalone and my eyes glaze over at all the rules
Unfortunately I do need to help my kids to learn to read and their school uses phonics so I guess I have to knuckle down and work it out.
Any suggestions ?

Jolly phonics do a DVD which ds really loves. We got it in ELC but I expect you can get it other places. It gives the sounds. How old are your children? I don't 'help' ds learn to read. The school teaches him to read. I listen to him, read with him and to him, but the school teaches him the sounds. He is one of the top readers in the class so it must be working. That said they use a mix of Jolly Phonics and look and say.

You can look at websites; pretend that you don't know and get your dc to teach you; get the older one to teach the younger one, of course I would never liar do that; some of the better books (e.g. Songbirds) have a little box on the back cover will all the diawatsists saying which ones are concentrated on in that book for instance 'au' 'ore' 'a' 'al' etc can all make the same sound, plus about 3 more which I obviously can't remember already! If all else fails then tell them to 'sound it out like you do at school' and then either say 'oh that's wonderful dc' or 'good try but can you guess what we might actually say because English is such a mule of a language that learning to read is a minefield '. Your school will probably also put on little seminars to help similarly looking haunted parents. By the time you get to dc3 you might have half a chance of knowing what you are doing.

A real expert will no doubt be along in a bit with some proper advice!

Thank you - especially for not laughing at my phonic-phobia!
I do leave it up to the school to do the teaching but DS (5) often stumbles at a word and when we work in spelling it out I'm stumped. C-a-t being ok but bear or bare (to use a recent MN example) being painful. I don't want to teach him the wrong way and of course sometimes it's adhoc ie a street sign so there is no cd or web to back up my appalling attempt.
Dd (4) is just starting out so hopefully she won't have to put up with so many strangled cat sounds!
Songbirds we have and like. Jolly phonics makes me a bit stabby but I guess I have to get suffer for the greater good.
Thanks again

God I also hate iPhones - various mistakes in that but sure you get the point... I'm actually known at work as a very good communicator (obviously fooled them!)

My ds who loves his phonics is slightly obsessed with alphablocks. You can watch their videos on the cbeebies website.

Don't get hung up on the phonics theory/baggage problem. Learning phonics (for either you or your child,) isn't actually learning to read, any more than learning the highway code is learning to drive. Yes, of course they're related but though most parents may well put L plates on the family car and sit beside their children, they may or may not test them on the highway code. It's up to them. Driving instructors are ideally placed to do that, just as some teachers are ideally placed to teach phonics. You know how to read so you can teach your children how you read. The main point is to teach them to read, not to teach them phonics. Let the school do that.

Why do you need to do anything? If the school is teaching reading and using phonics and it is as effective as they say, they should be able to teach your DC to read without your input. As there are children whose parents barely speak a word of English who still learn to read, I think you may be worrying unnecessarily.

Also, you will know what all the words in your child's reading book actually say. You don't have to give a detailed explanation of why; after all who knows why one is bear and the other bare? That's straying into philology rather than phonics.

Don't rely on the school to teach phonics entirely.You will still need to practice at home.Kids make far more progress when parents reinforce school work.I had to learn phonics so i could help dt and dc4.My eldest learnt in an overseas school that didn't follow any reading programme and i taught her by word recognition.At 6 she was one of the best readers in her class.At 6, here in the uk my dc's are far more proficient readers than she was and are really on a par with the rest of the class in a state primary.Most children can learn to read with phonics.Bright children learn very rapidly and will also employ some word recognition very early on.Some children take longer but will still progress [see it when i do reading as a parent helper].i don't know all the nomenclature behind the phonics teaching [had to ask my 6 year old what a split diagraph was!] but i do know how to sound out the words.Thats all you need.

I can't do phonics either ... I was never taught that way and I just can't remember how to sound 'e' or 'i' no matter how many times DS explains it to me. As for diagraphs and phonemes ...

DS is brilliant at it all, so I think it is mainly down to the teacher. I'm sure your DC will be fine. If DS is trying to decode a word I ask him to tell me the sounds rather than me telling him what the sounds are, so I get away without knowing them.

I'm hoping that DS1 will teach DS2. My brain just doesn't work that way. And in Yr1 DS has been told to learn spelling by letter names so phonics seems less important.

An easy way to go about it is to read with your ears.

It's about sounding out: you say you can do c-a-t. You can do phonics.

Don't get hung up on attempting to teach all the variants: just do the sounding out bit eg "it's b-air" if you really want to add an explanation, you can use the same one all the time 'some sounds can be written more than one way. "XXX" says "YYY" here'.

I have to say, that teaching phonics, along with the terminology, in reception, and then telling children to learn spelling by letter name in Y1, seems downright odd to me.

Edith, I guess it depends on what you mean by "doing phonics". I can sound out lots and lots of words but phonics fanatics spend al day reminding me that I don't understand phonics. (I guess it's a question of extent.) Vast numbers of people read successfully and have done for years without knowing what a phoneme, grapheme, digraph, split digraph, decoding, bla, bla, means, is or does. It's all unnecessary for the individual. It may be essential to a teacher who wants to get 100% of her class reading, (I don't know.) But none of it is necessary for me and my daughter. Both of us can read.

Just looked round a school where the headteacher told me that parents were not allowed to hear children reading in the school because they haven't been trained in phonics and so might 'do it wrongly'. So what about helping with reading at home? Is that now allowed either? It's crazy. All the parents learned to read themselves, long before phonics.

I'm the same havering

i think about this sometimes.

I'm already battling having a different accent from the people in this town, so that doesn't help.

I try to teach enunciation to the junior choir, and it's really hard to sound out each syllable!

i think the best way would be to look at the word they're trying and sound it out in chunks, rather than a word.

so:
cat - you'd do k-a-t, rather than go, okay, "c" goes Ku, "a" goes "aa" and "t" goes --ttt"
does that make sense?

Thats incredibly shortsighted Lostintoys.My dc's school welcome all parent readers.I really disagree with this teaching professionals idea of appearing to make phonics into a pseudo science-its not[although there is increasingly some science supporting it effectiveness].Basic phonics should be easy to employ for everyone.

OP

If your school does Jolly Phonics they may have some of the leaflets for parents. We received these for each of our dc. One page has a list of the sounds with the actions for them. If the school don't have them then try the site: jollylearning.co.uk/gallery/jolly-phonics-actions/

I have found with both of mine that when they get stuck it helps them more if I do the action for the sound to prompt them, and then they've at least partly worked it out themselves.