Ways to help 5 year old DD learn 'tricky' words

[yawningbear]

We have a big sheet of tricky words to learn and weshe is really struggling. After much time and effort she has now learnt most of her sounds, the jolly phonics rhymes were the key to this I think. She is still struggling to blend and now she has to learn a load of words by sight. It is not coming easily to her. They include words such as 'everyone' and 'pulled' and all have to be learnt by sight. We have been advised they are to be 'assessed' again next week so the pressure is on.

Well I was thinking of words like the or no (ds has.learnt that the letter o sounds like awe for example but hasn't yet learnt that it has different sounds depending on the word) but I guess if you learn the different sounds of a letter first or the sound two letters make together then they can be sounded out. Is that phonics then?
The only positive is that his teacher said they slow things right down in term 2 and focus on blending, so far it's all been pretty fast and furious.

Yup, that's phonics.

the has to be learned but no, is like go and so.

I have no idea why they teach them as tricky words here then. When i asked at the start of term the teacher said they teach phonics which they have done with sounds but that's obviously only part of it and they seem to have only taught one sound for each letter. They seem to be focusing more on these so called tricky words at the moment. No wonder ds is showing disinterest, it's confusing me.
I'm off to try and finish an essay on moral philosophy, which is far less confusing than all this to me.

They should be blending and segmenting right from the start HedgehogsRevenge ... now that's phonics!

They teach them as tricky words HedgehogsRevenge because that's how they were taught in the days of Look & Say, when the teacher was a child and most likely in their teacher training.

Ah, it's becoming clearer now. I was shocked that ds's teacher was a Mrs. She looks so young! They all do though but I think that's more to do with me getting old.

Well, if they didn't do phonics at the school where this or that teacher was a child then every word would have been a tricky word, or otherwise just a word, for short.

Yes columngollum they are all just words ... the "tricky" is a red herring and written words are visual representations of spoken words with the sounds represented by symbols (letters)

Sort of, tricky is used to denote the fact that the word has one or several unusual elements to it, like: sugar, cello, women, yacht and others.

'tricky' was a useful description for Sue Lloyd to use when she was developing her phonics programme 30ish years ago. The 'tricky' word was 'decodable but with a tricky bit'. Teachers who taught good phonics understood what the term was 'for' and how to teach the words it decribed. Trouble is that now phonics is 'mainstream' it's been subject to misinterpretation by teachers who don't always understand what they are doing, or why they are doing it. That's why we get the absurd assertion that 'tricky words' can't be sounded out...They are being conflated with the old High Frequency Word lists which were also popularly thought of as bein 'undecodable'.

And it was such a simple idea to start with

No "tricky" is used to denote that the word contains a sound spelling that the child hasn't yet been taught. There is nothing unusual about the o in no, go, so (it's a common spelling of /oa/) just as there is nothing unusual in the e spelling in he, she, me, we, be etc etc etc.
Interestingly sugar, cello, women, yacht don't feature in any "tricky" word lists

Well, they do now, this tricky word list.

Have been away for a couple of days and come back to back to all these helpful posts and masha's lists

Jinty64, it does sound the same, and it worries me that a group in your DS's class have now been changed onto a different scheme. Whatever is being expected of DD currently definitely is not working. I tried to sound out some of the words with her tonight and she refused saying 'no the teacher says we are not allowed to do that ' One of the words in question is 'got'

Scarletsmummy, it is isn't an independent school. It does have a very good reputation though, and her teachers are experienced.

Terribleteeth, what do we do with the fly swat?? That sounds like the kind of game DD would enjoy & lord knows I need some help with making this process fun

PastSellbyDate, Thanks for all the tips. DD really likes Alphablocks so I will check out the link, it would be good if there is a game she could play, she would like that and she is really struggling to blend so that might help.

Cheesy, it is the a kipper books we have here too, and likewise DD has no clue about any of it and is becoming extremely resistant to even looking at them.

Hedgehog, that sounds really stressful too and very similar. We have word bingo somewhere I should dig that out. I totally know that the only way forward for DD is to make it fun but it feels like such hard work. Tonight I was trying to help her with 'is' and although she could sound ' i ' and 's ' she was convinced it was ' it'

Will try uncovering the sounds as we go. Any other tips on helping her to blend?

Thanks again everyone.

only the one in your head columngollum I'm afraid

yawning - good to see you back, I was worried that we had driven you away with our bickering.

If you're looking for a game, DS2 has really enjoyed TeachYourMonsterTo Read. (It's by Usborne, and it's free.) Lots of minigames to learn the sounds, and then the second stage moves on to reading words. DS was happy to play it for much longer than he was happy to try reading a book.

Personally, if your DD is resistant to looking at books, I'd give them a miss for a few weeks. Go back to just reading books to her. You can still practise sounds and blending with words you see around the place, if she's happy to.

OP - My daughter goes to an Independent school in London & followed this same process. She was doing a mixed bag of easy to very difficult words using sight as well as phonics at age 4.5. In the beginning I felt just what you are feeling. The first or second week she was doing 'Digger'. Later I understood the process & found that it works. The school send home some of the words from the next week's reading book. Using flash cards the child is familiar with these and reads them by sight. Rest of the words are read by phonics. This keeps the speed good & keeps them interested. Only when she was in Yr 1 (2nd term) did they stop new flash card words & move completely to phonics - as by this time the child already has good reading speed. At 6 years (end of year1, as she is a summer baby) she was at a reading age of 8.5 years. There was a steep curve of 6 months of hard work with flash cards that got her going.

And no it didn't ruin the love of reading for her, Infact she can't put a book down till she's finished it and loves to read. I must add that this advanced reading has provided an additional advantage of being able to cope with other subjects as well more easily.

So I would suggest - don't give up yet, keep going & you will see how it works out.

Euphemia dd is at a Highland Council school. I know this will sound terrible but what are phonics exactly ?

I'm assuming dd has to just memorise all the words she gets sent home with. She really struggles with the word "the" which I suppose should be easier for her.

yawning my dd is also resistant to look at the books anymore.

Cheesy - 'the' and 'like' wore the worst of the lot! Took her months! Not to worry..

cheesypastaplease,

is your daughter trying to sound out the word the?

If she is, no wonder she's struggling with it! If the worst comes to the worst you could teach her the th digraph so she can sound "th" and pretend to be surprised that the word in question has a semi-redundant e on the end of it.

Or you could just teach her that the word the is pronounced the way that it is pronounced and when she sees that combination of three letters on their own she should read the word "the." That's the non phonetic way of doing it (the sensible way.)

So from the link posted by mrz I would say that ds is being taught in exactly the way they describe 'analytic phonics' as oppose to 'synthetic phonics' which they ?should be teaching. This weeks homework says "spelling/phonics 'magic e' with o words" and he is in P3 which would correspond with what is said in the link.

Ds3 is also at a Highland Council school.

Spanieleyes
Children are very happy with the concept that letters can represent more than one sound
Children go along with anything that adults impose on them, but they would be vastly happier if all graphemes/spellings had just one pronunciation and they were able to learn to read more easily. We would not get so many parents on MN voicing their worries about the difficulties which their children are experiencing. Nor would any parent be unsure about how to help.

But leaving that aside, if u want to find out which words are tricky, just make a note of the ones your child stumbles over when trying to decode while learning to read, especially the ones s/he stumbles over repeatedly. - U can even use those for helping your child learn to read by taking a closer look at them together and going over them a few times out of context.

No word is tricky once children have met them several times and get to the stage where they recognise them by sight. Words in which some letters don't have their main sound merely take longer to end up in their sight vocabulary.
'Air, fair, hair, pair' are easy peasy because air has only one pronunciation.

'Bone, stone, alone' would be easy too if it wasn't for spanners like 'one, gone, done'. The latter are not merely tricky, they disrupt the whole English spelling system and make learning to read and write much harder.

Hence the neverending disagreements among teachers on how best to teach reading and writing, and regular changes in teaching methods every few decades or so, without the slightest difference to overall standards.

Mrz tells us that since 1991 there has been growing consensus that phonics teaching should form a part of the reading curriculum. Part definitely. But by no means necessarily the whole of it.

SwimmingMom
The school send home some of the words from the next week's reading book. Using flash cards the child is familiar with these and reads them by sight. Rest of the words are read by phonics.

This makes perfect sense. Most of the words in any text are decodable: 75% of all English words are. Phonics works brilliantly with those, including most of the 300 HF ones which i posted earlier.

The ones that are harder are the ones with tricky bits in them: one, said, was, you, could ....

Spending more time on those makes perfect sense.

I don't think anyone ever argued that phonics should form the whole of learning to read, what has it to do with expression, inference, comprehension, irony or anything else unrelated to word structure?

But to be fair to phonics and other initial strategies, you have to be able to read at a basic level before tackling any of the other elements.

but they would be vastly happier if all graphemes/spellings had just one pronunciation and they were able to learn to read more easily. We would not get so many parents on MN voicing their worries about the difficulties which their children are experiencing. Nor would any parent be unsure about how to help.
Does the same apply to numbers? Are children confused because the 1 in 21 means something different to the 1 in 15 and the 1 in 134? Perhaps we should have one different symbol for each digit depending on its place value so children are happier!