I don't understand phonics and reading

[Catinthebed]

Ds is P1 Northern Ireland. Didn't know any letters or sounds when he started due to speech and language difficulty.

Has now done a number of phonics and had a few picture only readers. Today he got his first reading with a word in it and he knows it say "look". However he hasn't done L or K as a phonic.

He is Dc 4 and I am bit lost as none of the rest did phonics and it's complicated by speech and language complications.

Should I teach him to sound out "look" or is that going backwards given as he already knows it?

And you don't send home fully decodable books?

Mrz etc - should I be encouraging my daughter to learn some common words at all? Or expect her to pick them up with repeated sounding out in her books? So far I'm just letting her read but she sounds out a lot of them even when she's just sounded it out previously! Thankyou.

Some children need to sound out a word once to know it on the next page some children need to sound it out on every page and others need to "be given permission to stop sounding out" as they think that's what we want, so there is no hard and fast rule.
I would probably encourage her to learn one & two as they are unusual but other common words just need the alternative spellings for sounds explained.

Ah thanks :-) that's what I thought from the gist of previous threads but everynow and then people tall about the high frequency words and I'm not sure!

I absolutely love watching her learn to read :-)

Ds2 does not have any word books yet. Only pictures.
They have been learning satpin.
G and d.
They have a sheet of tricky words:
And, the, it, is, in, here, go, no, at.

All seems fine to me.
Yours system seems confused, like they are mixing too many techniques.

So yours are expected to learn the tricky words are they?

Most of those aren't tricky though are they - they're easily sound out able - hence my earlier question about learning some I guess. My daughter would sound most of those out I think. They're not tricky though?

OP I have ended up with 2 "read,write,Inc" how to help your child with phonics books, (one with flashcards,one stories) I could post you one if you like?

I had that ginn book when I learned to read. It's a classic. For some reason I vividly remember it.

Not actually helpful, though.

I found DS2 a pink band book with the word look in it to read tonight (neither of us could face the 8th day running of satp, which was crap the first time). I just taught him that 'oo' says 'ooh'. And he sounded it out. He loves making the oo sound, it turns out.

I'm Scottish, so I'm perplexed at the distinction between these supposedly different oos that all sound exactly the same in my accent.

High Frequency Words are words that are commonly found in texts it doesn't mean they can't be decoded.
it, in, at, and are really easy words to decode right from the beginning ... go and no only need the teacher to explain that the letter is a spelling for the sound /oe/ is the letter is a spelling for the sound /z/ here is 2 sounds /h/ & /ere/ so only need to explain the unknown sound.
I would teach children how to read them I wouldn't teach them as whole words

Thank you Euphemia i have been sat here mouthing 'zoo' look' 'look' 'zoo', zook' 'loo' and kept thinking 'but they are the same sound!!

Thought i was going mad (as did the cats)

But you Scots have "pour" being different to "poor" and "which" sounding different to "witch" which is clearly wrong I think it balances out somewhere along the line. But there are regional differences which is why phonics apps made in the US are pretty useless here. (Not to mention that they teach your child to sound out "fox" as "fucks"... )

Well phonics apps made in the uk are pretty much useless when you're Scottish, tbh. DS2 is being taught all kinds of wrongness!

I've been mouthing zoo, look over an over too. I can't even imagine what the difference is supposed to be. DH is from the south coast, and even imagining him saying them both isn't helping me.

I'm trying to figure out how pour and poor could sound the same. They don't sound the same when DH says them. One has a oh sound, the other an ooh.

Well, my problem is that DS2 is learning phonics from people with Geordie accents (not strong ones though) and lives with two Glaswegian accents and a Southern English one. It makes the whole thing a bit of a crap shoot really.

That's the thing I find most frustrating about the evangelical phonics stuff. It implies that they are somehow universal. Even the basic sounds are different. Down here they tend towards 'buh' rather than 'bih' for b, ' uh' rather than 'cih' for c, etc.

I'm usually the one that does stuff with DS2 at home so I'm just working from how things sound when I say them.

That said, it's not as bad as when we lived in Edinburgh and school taught DS1 to say sehven rather than sivin. The horror!

It never occurred to me until this point that English people don't say 'wh' properly. I shall endeavour to teach DS2 the difference. First I'm working on proper rs.

Erm... Possibly. It will mean he can never spell it properly.

OMG! Phonics isn't some dastardly Southern English plot to get everyone speaking like them. You use a bit of common sense and teach to the local accent. It's just that most phonics programmes are written by Southerners, so they use the letter/sound correspondences that they are familiar with.

I taught phonics to NE children. There was no way that they would believe that, for example, the 'a' in 'grass' was an /ah/ sound; though I pronounce it like that. It wasn't a problem; I just taught to their accent. The actual written word 'grass' means the green stuff that grows in a lawn (and lots of places where you don't want it) whatever accent you say it with. What's important is that children can decode the written word to the word as they say it and understand the what it means.

But what about when there are multiple different accents in the class. It does assume homogeneity within a group, even if you are adapting for that group.

And it does make a difference that most of the resources are based upon one particular accent.

But still, the evangelism!

Most children can sort of tweak it a bit once they've got the idea of sounding out and different combinations of letters representing different sounds. So it's not too much of an issue having different accents in the class. You often find that children will be picking up the majority accent in the playground anyway so they will be pronouncing some of the words they come across the same as the rest of the class anyway.

I taught 1st grade in New York for a while with a fairly RP southern English accent. It was far less complicated than you might imagine.

Not evangelism; pragmatism. Children hear different accents on TV, even if they don't hear them in real life. They are usually perfectly able to understand what is being said and probably generalise the word to their own accent anyway. I'm sure that a good teacher can accomodate the few that might find a different accent confusing.

My pupils were KS3, though, so probably more accustomed to different accents. Maybe some KS1 teachers could comment.

(Of course, non-native English-speakers probably end up with that dreaded Southern accent..)

I'm not convinced it makes much of a difference even in KS1. It might make more of a difference for children that move around a lot to areas with different accents or who have only just moved to an area.

With the exception of when I was in the US I think all or almost all of the children I've taught have the accent of our local area.

Of the two friends I have that have very different accents (US in the UK, their children had their parents' accent before starting pre-school but this weakened as they spent more time out of home. By the time they started reception they were very used to the local accent and were already using a more 'local' pronunciation for a lot of words.

Judging by the fact that many of the Polish children at church seem to be able to read fluently by the age of about 6/7 despite speaking very little English when starting school I'm not sure it makes much difference to them either.

Accent doesn't make a difference even in reception and KS1 where along with a variety of accents children are still developing speech sounds.

In my NE class I have children from as far north as the Shetland Isles, and as far south as Plymouth and they naturalise the words to their own accent as they decode without thinking

Accents don't make much of a difference, because believe it or not, apart from minor variations for a few sounds, the 44 English sounds are pronounced in much the same way in all accents. That's why speakers of English right across the world can understand each other (barring some very broad ones whose users don't want to be understood by anyone else). Educated English speech is much the same in all accents.