Anyone else with a Reception child who can't blend sounds together for reading?

[spookyskeleton]

Am getting really concerned about DS2 who still cannot blend sounds together - I feel we are no further forward than we were 4 months ago

He knows all the sounds and is confident with these but, for example will say the sounds that make 'cat' so c-a-t and then say something completely random like 'bed' when you ask what word it is.

Parents evening a few weeks ago, the teacher just kept saying he will get there but did not explain how that is going to happen if we haven't made progress so far.

I am concerned he is just getting left behind so much from his peers who all seem to be on proper reading books and get 3 a week whereas we are still on the sounds books and only get 1 a week.

I don't know what to do or where to turn for assistance if the school aren't bothered but we are 2 terms in now and I am certain he needs further help.

Anyone else in this position?

Someone on here ages ago told me about a robot game you can play, don't call it phonics, but you basically pretend to be a robot who says certain words in robot speak - you say each sound of the word separately rather than together. The example she gave was that you practise it in the supermarket, so the robot says "Can you get me some eh-gg-z?" and the child has to work out what the robot is saying. It gives them practice at blending without realising it.

c-a-t is a hard one because the c and t sounds are both hard to say/elongate without doing "cuh" and "tuh" (t is easier, it's sort of a tutting sound) - an easier word to practise on is something like "mum" because the m sound can be elongated like the vowel sound can.

I don't think we are saying anything that different, Merry.

I certainly agree with your last paragraph. Someone asked me what I hoped for for my kids recently and I have been think about it a lot. I started off thinking "happiness" but having thought things I think the best thing to aspire to is authenticity and personal growth.

I hope my kids can live authentic lives, where they can discover and be fully true to themselves and their enthusiasms, and where as each period of their lives passes they develop in wisdom and understanding.

Anyway back to the topic!

merry yes DS1 is clearly a high achiever (working way above expectations, incredibly sporty, confident, popular etc) and I really don't want DS2 to be in his shadow . however DS1 does not have a creative bone in his body! His creative writing is always a rehashing of a story he had read using the same character names etc - whilst it is grammatically perfect etc, it is not original whereas I can only imagine what DS2 could do in creative writing... his stories would be AMAZING.

that is why I accept they are all different as I have 2 complete opposite children but I really don't want DS2 to feel that his strengths are not as valued as Ds1's strengths so I need to help and encourage him (am trying to find local drama groups as he would thrive in that) but I also need to help him master basic skills as well.

MaizieD - I don't think anyone has ever just told DD the words, certainly we have always sounded them out with (except really FOR her because she couldn't get it), we never just tell her a word (I know all about teaching children to read using phonics and yes that includes pronouncing phonics correctly). School teach by phonics so I doubt they have told her the words either to be honest. A child with a good memory though if someone reads a book to them where they can see the words and follow them will memorise the words and you can't read a story to them sounding out each and every word so that this isn't a possibility.

The problem is that SOME children just can't get it without seriously concentrated therapy for whatever their problem is. If a child can't hear the sounds or can read them right in their head but can't get the right sounds to come out of their mouth then they need this identifying. SOME children have specific problems that are not going to be identified or cured within the classroom, even if the teacher is brilliant. The SALT has told me the exact problem she thinks DD has is actually quite rare and is sometimes linked to phonological processing or specific word retrieval and that a school wouldn't pick it up in a clever child because the child will work out ways to compensate.

Yes there is a lot of relax and give them a chance to pick it up in their own time but there is also a small number of cases were for some children it just isn't going to work like that and I personally would hate to come on here and say 'oh they will be fine' when I know from our experience that sometimes that isn't the case and not share that possibility with the OP that it IS something she should keep an eye on and it might not be an obvious problem like dyslexia, there are other problems which can affect reading. If someone had suggested this to me a year ago then we could have explored this possibility earlier before it caused DD so much frustration.

bumps, great post!

spooky, it's great to have 2 such different kids. They can be best friends, a good team, and will help you appreciate/ grow all round as well.

nonicknames, what has the diagnosis actually achieved for your dd in terms of help?

He needs more oral work, breaking up words into their component sounds then putting them back together again. So at home, talk about the first sound in a word until he's got that the first sound of sofa is 's', of apple is 'a' etc. Then get him to listen for the last sound. Combine those, and you'll get that 'cat' starts with 'c' and ends with 't'. Now, what sound can he hear in the middle? Then start separating short (cvc so 3-letter) words into cat = c-a-t = cat. All orally, as you're going about your everyday life. Each stage takes as long as it takes, until he's finding it easy. One he can say and hear the individual sounds in the words, he'll be able to blend when reading.

• Once

OP, here are some useful links...they help me appreciate ds1 more and to be able to 'big him up' a bit.

love this article on creativity. I told ds1 the other day that day dreaming is a very good quality to have! This reinforces it.

Ted talk on creativity in schools

nothing at the moment MerryMarigold as we are still trying to get a diagnosis, appt this week.

she won't qualify for any help at school as she is doing ok (partly due to being the oldest, partly I assume due to being very bright and having a good memory), we will pay for any therapy she needs privately though as the NHS lists are so long and I would rather help her before she goes into the next academic year if we can.

my younger daughter is reading in what I would call a normal way, she has learned her phonics, sometimes makes mistakes with them but can segment words well (when she can be bothered to look at the page) and is making normal - good progress. DD1's experiences with her segmenting are just 'odd'.

nonicknames, can you tell us more about the odd segmenting. I am interested as I have wondered about ds and auditory processing. He is doing something called The Listening Programme at the moment, but it's not really helped hugely as far as I can see.

With DD, what helped her to 'click' was us buying 3D fridge magnet letters (so lower case alphabet letters) that she could play with and put together. I think for her it was being able to physically 'see' the letters in 3D and 'make' the word. She literally got it within about 5 minutes once she could 'touch' the letters and make the words.

Thanks for both perspectives nonickname I am certainly going to keep my eye on it. I have a friend who is a KS1 teacher who isn't working at the moment. Wonder if she woukd fancy doing some private tutoring with him - do you think that would help?

merry that link about creative people is exactly like DS2 - the enthusiasm for trying new things (he will try every new food you throw at him ) daydreaming, putting himself into other people's heads, needing solitary time (he quite often takes himself off into a different room than us to play).

Am going to try reading eggsthis afternoon. We also have a magnetic board with lower case letters so may get that out and start playing with it.

Do listen to the TED talk (maybe with dh too). I just listened to it again, it is very funny and very clever. If you are not a creative person yourself, or come from a family that really valued academic achievement...it helped my dh!

well it is hard to describe - I spent years working in classrooms with yr1 and 2 children and have teachers in close family so I had 'ideas' of how reading SHOULD go with my own children.

ok if you give her the word 'propagation' to read she would say 'protation' and then be trying to correct it (even without being told it was incorrect and as it was a stand alone word it wouldn't be trying to make it a word she already knew or in context) and then would say 'but I can see a g and can't get it to come out. or another word might have a t in the middle and she will say th and say but I don't want to say th I want to say t. she can say the sounds individually or in very short words but in a longer word she stumbles. it is strange and I have known for a year it wasn't right but it was only this week she managed to tell me that she is trying to say something different to what is coming out. I always assumed she wasn't 'seeing' it right if that makes sense.

Now she has told me this I have listened to her when she speaks and she does substitute words wrongly so say brother when she means sister but will be convinced she said sister, and she uses a lot of holding language when telling us things, so will say a lot of 'and the and um the the and' in the middle of a sentence. I have always assumed this was due to brain running away with her a bit and mouth not being able to keep up but now I can see it could be linked to the other problems.

The thing is without having any idea what she was seeing or thinking (she is a small child, she couldn't tell us and of course she wouldn't know that that wasn't normal) it would have just looked like a child who doesn't know their phonics securely (which she does) or a child with dyslexia (which we now know she doesn't have) and I would never have considered any sort of language problem for her because she spoke early, she talks clearly, uses a wide range of vocabulary and so on and the other little indicators I have just mentioned aren't especially unusual in a child I don't think in many cases.

Ds didn't/couldn't blend throughout P1 (= approx Reception). I knew he wasn't reading, he was just learning his books off by heart. School said not to owrry, some kids (especially boys) are just not developmentally ready until they are 6.

At the beginning of P2 he had 6 weeks of intensive 1:1 support from the depute head before we mutually agreed he should drop from the top group for language inot the middle group, for his own self-confidence.

He finally "got" blending towards the end of P2 (age about 6.5).

It took him until then end of P4 before he was ready to move back into the top group (for a long time he was "between" groups and we did separate extension reading with him. The school said just to encourage him with whatever interested him - that meant tolerating Captain Underpants and then buying all the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. A real incentive for him to learn to read was the ability to go to the Sprts pages to see how "his" team was doing.

He is now 13 in S2 at secodnary, free reads :):) (currently reading "The Subtle Knife" from the Northern Lights Trilogy), is in the top set for English according to his teacher, an extremely talented cohort and has been studying "Of Mice and Men" at school.

Continue supporting your ds2 but if you have confidence in the school (as in our case - and they were proven right), just relax and keep reading materials around so that he can see that reading is fun. He'll get there :)

I don't think anyone has ever just told DD the words, certainly we have always sounded them out with (except really FOR her because she couldn't get it),

Sorry, I copied and pasted the exact words from your post which said that she'd memorised every words she'd been told. I assumed that 'told' meant what it usually means; child doesn't 'know' words, teacher or parent tells them what it 'says'.

I'm finding what you are saying, in regard to the school, a bit contradictory/puzzling. They may be teaching phonics of a kind but if they are doing it well/properly they would be very concerned about a child who couldn't sound out and blend, not telling you she's doing fine because she's able to memorise words.

Does she have no idea whatsoever about sounding out and blending? What does she do when she encounters an unfamiliar word?

FOR is not F-O-R, it is F-OR, so I am surprised she struggled with this any more than SH-OR-T or F-OR-K. They shouldn't learn FOR until they learn the 'or' sound.

My dd does struggle with NOT and GOT, because they have learned 'no' and 'go' as tricky words, but obviously you don't say NO-T (as that would be note).

My dd is in reception and blending did not come easily to her - it took just over a term and she is in a small class and gets a lot of help.

Which books is he reading? My dds both leaned to read much more easily with phonics style reading books. Dd3 had one scheme called 'Dandelion Launchers' for a while.

Maizie I have raised it with them time and time again but the words they try her with are ones she knows. She has been reading since she was 3 so I know how I taught her to read and I followed phonics. School are seemingly pretty unaware of her problem because she has been reading fluently since before she started school. I have brought it to their attention and they still haven't actually tried giving her words she doesn't know. she knows how to sound out and she knows how to blend, she can spell well phonetically. she just can't SAY the sound she WANTS to say. like I said - it is very odd. in her books now she does get lots of words she doesn't know but in reading maybe 3 pages of a chapter book to a member of staff a week they won't see a huge number of these and some of them are pretty complex words so to be fair a lot of children may get their knickers in a twist with them so I suspect now, given the level she is reading at, they quite possibly do just tell her the word because as far as they are concerned there isn't actually a problem so they aren't looking for one if that makes sense.

It has been worrying me for over a year now but because she is so far above average it isn't picked up on. I am very aware that it is going to cause her problems in the future unless we can work out how to help her.

Merry - I didn't mean the word for I meant that we are sounding out the word with her but as she struggles to do it we are sounding it out for her. sorry - it wasn't clear with the way I said it.

she knows all her sounds, split digraphs, tion, tious etc too. she is now in Yr1. I don't have any concerns about her not knowing the sounds as given them individually or if she hears the letters then she knows them.

she is obviously unique. sadly that might be wonderful but it doesn't help her.

I am really hoping she fails the phonics check in the hope that they might then notice but hopefully we will have an answer then about whether she has this thing the SALT thinks she does. wish I could remember the name but it was over the phone and I was trying to note the appointment time so didn't write it down.

oh and we have also investigated tracking issues, eye convergence and so on.

sorry OP - I have completely gone off track with your post.

We got to last term and this was still and issue with DS - teachers were doing speaking slowly thing which he didn't really respond to.

So we did dancing bears - sound foundation book - was a long slog and we did appear at time that he can't hear all the sounds in words. He did get there and was IMO reading better than his older sister at same age.

Now we are having similar issue with spelling in year 2 - he's not hearing all the sounds and we are doing the apples and pears book.

I'm doing the dancing bears book with DD2 - because while they have move away from the mixed reading methods that are still causing my eldest in yr4 problems - some of the people who hear her read still write notes about DD2 should be remembering words rather than sound out and her reading books despite being phonics base - unlike eldest at that age - still seem full of words that are tricky - not straight forward to work out.

He may have got there eventually by himself but he got there faster with the extra practise and it stop him calling himself bad at reading.

In my experience many children in Reception classes are capable of recognising initial sounds but the ability to blend sounds can take time. Some children benefit from more time being spent on Phase 1 Letters and Sounds which has games and activities that encourage children to become more attuned to sounds in general.