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, the Romans did have a system like that, didn't they. I seem to remember doing a bit of multiplication with Roman numerals. They didn't have zero, too. I think I know why the Barbarians invaded, now. They did us all a favour.

spaniel - I don't understand your point about numbers. Masha makes an entirely valid point that reading and spelling would be much easier with a one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes. But most of us think it's a few hundred years too late to change the system we have.

Masha thinks it's never too late! Well, surely then it would be easier with a 1;1 correspondence for numbers too, but I don't think she is suggesting we re-write the whole number system!

But that argument doesn't work, because the way that we encode place value is massively more useful than eg Roman numerals. Whereas standardising spelling would (probably) be very helpful, but logistically problematic.