DS is 5. He's not at a UK school as we are in Germany but as he is showing interest and trying to figure out what different sounds letters make, I wanted to give him some kind of structure.
I saw the Biff, Chip and Kipper books in The Works (before we moved) and saw that they have separate streams for "First Stories" (which seemed to be based on sight-reading) and "Phonics". The first four in the Phonics section were great and we're getting a lot out of them. DS finds them challenging but he is improving and he finds it a fun format.
However, I've got set 2 and two books each from 3 and 4 (because that was what they had at the time) and I've just read through "I am Kipper" which is the first book in set 2. DS is very confident with the basic letter sounds, but I think he's ready to move on to more... the problem is that this book seems to introduce them without actually focusing on them. In I am Kipper you have "I", and "Kipper" isn't phoenetic either because of the /er/.
In the second story in this book you also get "the" and the names Chip and Fluffy which again have new phonic sounds in them.
Now, ok, I could forgive the names since the names are from the original series which was based more on sight-reading, I understand. I've also read that some high-frequency words which have more advanced phonics (such as "the" and "I") are usually taught separately, because it's difficult to make stories for children to read without them.
However, the other books in Level 2 have the words "he" "put" "was" "she" "into" (and in the last one) "said", again, without focusing on the sounds in these words.
Are these normal words to teach separately or is this a failing of the particular series? I don't know whether to persevere with it or not. The whole reason that I decided to look into a reading scheme was because I like the way that phonics based teaching works and although he would probably be fine with a whole-word approach/working it out by himself, I like the other things that phonics teaches and I'd like to cover the phonics properly. Having flicked through a couple of the later books, although it's not always obvious which sounds have been covered because I have gaps, it seems this keeps popping up although it might be one word out of a whole book with an unfamiliar sound.
What do you think? Should I carry on with this scheme or is there a better one? Preferably not too expensive although I am teaching English here and may potentially teach children at some point in the future so they could come in handy for the right age group, but primarily I'm buying them to use with DS.