Active discussions

Are your children’s vaccines up to date?

Set a reminder

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Primary education

Join our Primary Education forum to discuss starting school and helping your child get the most out of it.

Original poster

"So" is a sight word and can't be sounded out...

312 replies

Stampstamp · 19/09/2013 13:11

Said the reception class teacher today. Aaargh! Thank heavens DD can already mostly read (she's nearly 5). Why do some teachers and schools have such a limited understanding of phonics, it seems so fundamental to me?

OP posts:
Are your children’s vaccines up to date?
Set a reminder
mrz · 19/09/2013 21:14

They are only taught by sight if the school is continuing to teach mixed methods despite the DfE policy to teach phonics.

eddiemairswife · 19/09/2013 22:42

How do you teach phonics with respect to accents? i.e. I am a Londoner, pronounce castle,path etc. with a long 'a'; would I have to change my accent to teach children in the Midlands,Yorkshire.

fizzly · 19/09/2013 22:43

mrz very quick question. As a teacher, how do you manage the fact that some children will have learned some words by 'incorrect' methods (sight, mix of sight and phonics taught by parents who don't now better....err....me) when they arrive in primary? I'm genuinely interested in this. DS is just 4 and has just started reception. He's been reading (blending relatively simple words) for a while and I have had to give my own crap explanation of tricky words as time has gone on and he has been desperate to read more and more. He has a phenomenal memory and has certainly learned meany of these words by sight, even though he can decode when he tries to do so slowly but I've not been able to give proper explanations for (for example) split digraphs. However, he can comfortably 'read' words like 'gone, done, love' etc as well as 'tricky' words like 'he, she, me, be, said etc. I totally buy in to the phonics approach, but short of keeping him away from all books for the last 6 months I don't think there's anything I could have done to avoid this situation and let him only learn true phonics at school. So, now he is in reception, he is going to have to sit through phonics 'lessons' (which I'm completely happy about) but will be reading things that are well above the level of some others in the class (who are still learning basics of what is a b and e and m etc). I'm happy that this school 'differentiates' in a reasonable but cannot work out how one actually deals with this in teaching terms when the whole class is learning about the 'ow' sound for example (which he has known for at least 6 months).

nickelbabe · 19/09/2013 23:04

eddie generally, the people being taught the phonics are taught by someone of the same accent (or at least with the proper training in that accent)
so, I was taught in nottingham by nottingham teachers and dd will be taught in sittingbourne by sittingbourne teachers (poor thing)

notwoo · 19/09/2013 23:12

mrz I just have to take this opportunity to say how much I enjoy and admire your phonics posts.

I am very pleased with my DD's reception teacher but I would love her to be taught by you!

LindyHemming · 19/09/2013 23:13

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

ClayDavis · 19/09/2013 23:13

That's not necessarily true, nickelbabe.

With a/ar if I was sounding out with the children or teaching the sound I would do it in the accent used by the children. Otherwise children are quite good at tweaking the sound a bit. I taught 1st grade in the US for a while and it caused much fewer problems than you would think.

Bethanybunny · 19/09/2013 23:14

OP, I am with you on this. It is shocking that so many teachers refuse to fully accept the phonics approach. Mostly, I think because they don't understand it properly, and because they assume that children need to have strict, simple rules.

I think children can cope with a lot more complexity than we give them credit for. I taught my DD1 very early on that one letter can be pronounced in various different ways. We're from the London area, where 'a' is often pronounced 'ar' (as in last) as well as 'ay' (lady) and the more usual 'a' (pat). 'O' can be 'u' (love) 'oh' (no/so/go) and 'oo' (to/do).

I never taught these as tricky words, just as alternative pronunciations. DD1 took them all in her stride- and at the start of Y1 is well ahead of her peers who have been taught using mixed methods by the school. I'm so glad I educated myself through MN before working on her reading!

nickelbabe · 19/09/2013 23:33

clay that was why I said or proper training in.thatxaccent. I suppose that was ambiguous. I meant "in using that accent" or "in teaching that accent"

most children, as you say, would be able to adjust the teacher's spoken words into their own accent and wotk it out from there.

BlackeyedSusan · 19/09/2013 23:34

oh 'eck nickle, theres no hope for you then duck...

cold for me ... o is somewhere between oa and short o.

nickelbabe · 19/09/2013 23:36

yes, "coad" is about the right pronunciation Grin

and "bird" is pronounced "bod"

nickelbabe · 19/09/2013 23:37

it's the sittingbourne "wewd (like weld but a w instead of an l) for world and gew for girl that I cannot reconcile.

TheBuskersDog · 20/09/2013 00:11

I speak with a different accent to the children I work with, there is no way I would put on a different accent to teach them phonics but where relevant I will refer to how we pronounce things differently.
Maybe because there is not really a strong local accent, more generic middle England, and many of their parents are not local born and bred but the children seem to have no problems with the fact that we say grass, bath, laugh etc. differently.

ClayDavis · 20/09/2013 00:14

I don't think I ever had any proper training. I'd been in the country less than a week. I'm not sure if that sort of training exists. I'm not aware of anyone round here having had any.

frazzled, I think you've got High frequency words and tricky words mixed up a bit. HFW are words that occur very commonly in written language. The 26 that are decodeable at phase 2 won't be tricky because they contain only code knowledge taught at that stage. The 'tricky' words contain one or more pieces of code that hasn't been taught yet. They are taught by pointing out the tricky part of the word and teaching children how to blend it.

merrymouse · 20/09/2013 06:18

euphemia I think english people are taught that 'wh' sounds different, even if they pronounce it as 'w'.

(Although looking back was that school or my Scottish grandmother?)

LindyHemming · 20/09/2013 06:28

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

lljkk · 20/09/2013 06:29

I agree with teacher in OP .

pozzled · 20/09/2013 06:49

How can anyone agree with the teacher? I genuinely don't understand. 'It is a tricky word'- yep, true. 'It is harder to sound out because the 'o' isn't said in the same way as the 'o' in 'dog'- true. 'We haven't learned the code for this word yet, so we have to look at it carefully'- fine.

But 'it can't be sounded out'? Nonsense. It can. My DD learned it by sounding it out. Same as 'no' 'go' 'we' 'he' 'she', and, later on 'to' and 'do'. She sounded them out easily once she had been taught the alternative pronunciations.

mrz · 20/09/2013 07:04

fizzly if a child recognises some words when they start school it can only be a good thing obviously as part of the general lessons they will learn how the sounds in that word are spelt so they can apply that knowledge to other words that have the same sound/spelling.

mrz · 20/09/2013 07:08

Like many Dept for Ed documents (produced by committee) Letters & Sounds contains wording that isn't clear and choice of words that has obviously caused confusion ...and don't get me started on those stupid phases!!

mrz · 20/09/2013 07:12

Teachers should adjust their teaching to accommodate the main accent of the children they teach for example if I'm teaching grass, bath, path, pass, laugh ... I would teach that the & represent the sound /a/ but if I were teaching in some other parts of the UK I would teach that they represent the spoken sound /ar/ accent really doesn't matter in phonics

meditrina · 20/09/2013 07:18

I think there are a lot of people who don't understand the importance of the sound of the language in reading.

Eg from earlier in the thread: "We didn't do phonics then, but learnt CAT spells cat, DOG spells dog etc.". This is a phonic approach.

And phonics works via the phonemes of the language (the units of sound that, if changed, change the meaning of the word) - not the phonetics (the actual noises that are produced ) which is why all accents are accommodated.

"Tricky" words can be sounded out - they are simply termed as such because they contain correspondences that have not yet been explicitly taught.

The correspondences are not one to one, either sound-letter (phoneme-grapheme) nor letter-sound. I think this is what confuses some people who aren't very familiar with phonics.

SummerSevern · 20/09/2013 08:21

In Letters and Sounds this would be learned as a non-decodable sight word until the latter end of phase 5, when children learn that o can make an /oa/ sound. Phase 5 is generally taught in Year 1.

Feenie · 20/09/2013 08:29

In Letters and Sounds this would be learned as a non-decodable sight word

Garbage. There is NOTHING in Letters and Sounds which refers to either non-decodable OR sight words. They don't even appear in the document.

More confusion from teachers who THINK this is what they should be teaching - the training for Letters and Sounds must have been truly woeful, because this mis-interpretation gives the very opposite message to the one Letters and Sounds tried to achieve.

friday16 · 20/09/2013 08:41

But 'it can't be sounded out'? Nonsense. It can.

So can be sounded out in such a way that the long vowel is apparent? So why doesn't "do" rhyme with "dough"? Why doesn't "to" rhyme with "tow"? You can obviously sound "so" out with a long vowel if, a priori, you know that the vowel is long whereas it's short in other cases of a consonant followed by an o. But that's effectively sight knowledge, yes? How would a pure phonics approach explain the different vowels in to, do on the one hand and so and go on the other?

Answers on the back of a postcard addressed to Masha Bell please.

All words can be sounded out. Words are written representations of speech.

Mr Cholmondeley is now a student at Magdalen College, apparently.