Forced baby behaviour?

[learnandsay]

Are simplistic phonics books good, bad or neutral? If a Reception child can already read Ladybird stories such as Three Little Pigs, Where the Wild Things Are, Dr Seuss, etc, etc, etc but they're bringing home apparently the whole ORT 1+ range comprising of nothing but CVC words which present no challenge and no learning opportunity either, is reading them:

(1) a waste of time, reading time is precious, doesn't it make more sense to spend it on reading words which present a learning opportunity?

(2) potentially leading towards reading becoming uninteresting

(3) promoting ignorance - if the child can read the names of countries already the child could be reading sentences like: The Nile is the longest river in the world, instead of sentences like Dot got a pot and Bot got Dot's pot. Pat pat pat, tap tap tap.

In summary, would the time be better spent reading something useful?

Sorry, Ninah, what can I do to update you?

learnandsay it matters because your daughter has to spell words too.

be interested to know result of teacher chat, and what system is in place

Ah, I see, mrz. And going back a couple of steps. When you described ear as "er" what spelling advantage does it confer?

If a child knows that the sound "er" can be written they can apply that in words. However if their mum has told them is how to write "u" they are going to struggle

When do we write the sound "er" as ear?

Mum's not going to tell her you can write "ea" as "u".

What mum is telling her is that a lot of words don't look the way they sound. So if you ask her how to spell bear for example she'll say "bee" "ee" "ar" ru"

When we write Earth and early and earn and learn and search and ...
we also write "er" as in girl and "er" as in curl and "er" as in world and "er" as in collar and even "er" as in fern [wink

Even supposing that a child was aware of the different phoneme spellings available how does it know which one applies? Presumably if it doesn't know you just get phonically plausible misspellings.

Most Y1 children will be aware of those ways to spell the sound "er" and using them in reading and writing and sometimes they may get confused and will need to be told that the "er" sound in this word is spelt this way ...

I don't say erth, ern, and lern.

what do you say?

I suppose it's solved in this case by calling it "ur" as you suggested.

urn, lurn and urth.

it's the same sound learnandsay

bur 'ur' is an alternative spelling for the sound so you DO say it erth, ern and lern [in phonics terms].

So the phonic sound can be encoded

'er e.g. fern
'ur' e.g. turn
'ear' e.g. learn

Phonics terminology has chosen to represent this phoneme as for clarity (I presume because is a completely separate phoneme).

She might not. It might be an accent difference. She might say the vowel in the word 'girl' quite distinctly differently from that in the word 'turn'.

I don't find it the same sound, mrz.

er as in (er)ror

I wouldn't use that sound in the word learn, (unless I came from Liverpool.) In that city they probably berry their mam in an ern

too

as teacherwith2kids has said "er" is just a standard way to represent the sound regardless of accent and regardless of whether it's spelt or

I would read error as e rr or....

We could use the phonemic alphabet to represent sounds and the alphabet to represent spellings

So would I simpson ... I think learnandsay is looking at letter patterns

Interesting point about error.

I'd divide it into the phonemes
'e' (as in egg) 'r' (as in red) 'er' (see duscussion above about the fact that is an alternative spelling for that sound)

not
'er' 'er'

I think the moral of the story, learnandsay, is that teaching phonics is probably best left to your dd's teacher!

Which leaves you in the wonderful position of being the one who just gets to encourage her to love books and reading - much more fun!

(As a mum, by the way, before I trained as a teacher, I found the Jolly Phonics Teachers' Handbook a very accessible introduction to synthetic phonics. Alternatively - if you ignore the phases - the Government's Letters and Sounds programme is a free resource which at least uses standard terminology and introduces the standard phones and alternative ways of writing them sytematically. Both are better than trying to 'invent' a new system using self-decided phonemes and graphemes, which will confuse your dd.