Phonics/high frequency words/early reading

[bluewisteria]

Hello, hoping for some pointers for my DD, 4yrs 5 mths.

We have started reading small words/phonics, maybe 15 mins a day, which she loves. Using Teach Your Monster to Read/Reading Eggs/Oxford Reading Tree books (Chip, Biff etc which I'm a little about...).

I would say she is now pretty good at reading 3 letter words, but is tripping up on fluently joining 's' and 'h' together to form 'sh', elongating 'e' to 'ee' when reading 'ea', etc. Is there a set of high frequency letter combinations/words that I could look at to help her out? Maybe a website I could print these off? Not entirely sure what I am looking for here...?!

Also, she starts school in September, having not been to nursery, and we have been told they teach Nelson font in handwriting. The school have said they don't mind messy writing as long as the technique is correct, so to use this font. Can I print this out anywhere too? She enjoys writing letters/postcards if I help her to spell out the words. I thought I may as well use the school's technique with her now. I seem to remember a friend telling me that there is a website where you can write out your own work sheets in chosen font and print?

Any other thoughts/suggestions/tips gratefully received!

Thanking you

I would say she is now pretty good at reading 3 letter words, but is tripping up on fluently joining 's' and 'h' together to form 'sh',

She isn't meant to join s & h to form sh she needs to be taught that some sounds are spelt with 1, 2, 3 or even 4 letters and the the spelling sh is one way we spell the sound /sh/ (not the only one) and that the sound /ee/ can be spelt e, ee, ea, y,etc

If you have an ipad I would recommend itunes.apple.com/gb/app/id769196201?mt=8&affId=1736887 as it will show you how to help her blend sounds to read words and help her to learn to read and spell.

Mrz Thank you, I appreciate that. I have an AppleMac with itunes so hopefully I can work it out.

This is just an example but a set of flashcards like this have all the phonics sounds including sounds like /sh/ /igh/ etc
www.amazon.co.uk/Read-Write-Inc-Home-Flashcards/dp/0198386710

I wouldn't worry too much as lots of children start school with no reading and in YR they start off at the very beginning

blue I think that's an ipad app so won't work on a laptop/computer

Glasses - yes, you're right, ah well. It was just to start in a correct method really, I didn't want her to have to unlearn anything I might teach her!

The flashcards look great, thank you. THey look as if they give the breadth of possibilities of spelling combos that MRZ mentioned too.

www.sounds-write.co.uk/docs/sounds_write_common_spellings_of_the_consonants_and_vowels.pdf

Blimey, there are a lot of them! But that's great MRZ thank you.
Any other suggestions very welcome!

English is complex

We have 44 spoken sounds in our language (depending on accent) but only 26 letters in the alphabet so have a problem.

In English a sound can be spelt with 1,2,3 or 4 letter
One sound can have more than one spelling /ae/ can be spelt r ai n, d ay, c a k e, gr ea t,

th ey , eigh t, str aigh t a pron, v ei l
One spelling can represent more than one sound - ea can spell /ae/ in steak /ee/ in meat and /e/ in bread

I found the RWInc cards good for DD2 to learn her sounds.
We made a postbox from a cereal box, and as we went through the cards, the ones she knew she posted into the box. We added more cards in as she got confident with the easier sounds. She really enjoyed this game.

Another easy to use and entertaining book that can support children and parents in phonics, is reviewed in the MN Book Reviews. If you look in the "children's educational books and courses" section you should see the Oxford Phonics Spelling Dictionary. There is a link so you can view sample pages from it, and also purchase it if you wish.

The important thing is that DD is doing things because she WANTS to, and finds it enjoyable. Forcing a child to try and learn will, of course, do more harm than good. School is also about a lot more than 'work' and it is perhaps unfortunate she has missed out on the social aspects of being in nursery or playgroup.

Teen and Ferguson - Many thanks for the recommendations, I will definitely take a look at them.

Regarding self directed learning, I completely agree. I definitely can't imagine being the parent that waves the flash cards around and demands some 'school time'! All of the 'educational tools' that I have are in a specific place and she gets them out when she wants to, which is pretty much every day. I don't suggest it, there is no need. But if she didn't suggest them, then my take on it would be that she isn't ready yet. At school she will have to conform to learning timetables, so I let her direct herself while she can.

As for nursery, we did try it. Unfortunately it didn't work for her, she really wasn't ready. A new sibling had come along and it greatly affected her. We decided it was better for her to form stronger bonds with her sister and work on that, than force a generic shuffling into nursery 'because we should'. Luckily we had a choice in the matter too. She is very sociable, we go to lots of playgroups etc, and is now very ready for school and will thrive there. And as we haven't been locked into school terms yet, we have taken the opportunity to do something completely different for a few months. My husband wangled a sabbatical, we rented our house out and are currently in Andalucia...the girls have spent the day climbing olive trees and swimming naked in a lake. My point is that we have tried to respond to her needs individually up until now - and that includes learning to read. But there comes a point where we need to know how/what she should learn, hence the post. At some stage, the information/teaching we are giving her needs to be fairly specific.

There have been great suggestions, thank you. Keep them coming!

Isn't it spelling we are talking about masha? How sounds are spelt for reading and writing? Although your lists do make things more complex confusing than ever.

the grapheme spelling in beach is ea representing the sound /ee/ the same spelling represents /e/ in bread and /ae/ in break

but
the spelling in beard is ear representing the sound /ear/
the spelling in beaustiful is eau representing the sound /yoo/

they are very different graphemes masha even though they contain the same letters

Pity she doesn't sort her lists by 'sound'. They'd be more helpful then. But I suppose that being helpful is not Marsha's objective. Her lists are designed to scare...

maizieD: Pity she doesn't sort her lists by 'sound'.
It's a pity u comment on my lists, having admitted on another thread that u never look at them.

I posted 3 different lists.

1. The first shows the 91 main and 114 variant spellings for the 44 English sounds.

2. The second shows the 69 letters and letter strings which have more than one pronunciation and cause reading difficulties for many beginners.

3. Common words which are tricky because they contain the letters/graphemes ea, o, o-e, ou, ow and oo.

I appreciate that my lists are of little interest to an expert like u. I hope they are helpful to people who want to understand what learning to read and write English involves, why many children need a very long time for it and why teachers have difficulty agreeing on the best way of teaching those skills. I am trying to shine an objective light on a very long-standing problem on which successive governments have spent billions.

I responded to the often repeated lie by Mrz that,
We have 44 spoken sounds in our language (depending on accent) but only 26 letters in the alphabet so have a problem.

Combining letters for sounds (ch, ai, ay) does not have to cause any problems whatsoever - if used consistently.

Using them haphazardly causes difficulties, e.g. chat, character, chalet.

I was driven to taking a really close look at English spelling by repeatedly coming across too many dodgy claims about it made by 'experts'.
Masha Bell

It's a pity u comment on my lists, having admitted on another thread that u never look at them.

I have looked at them in the past, but don't see any need to do so every single time you post one.

In addition, I am very familiar with letter/sound correspondences of English, having taught phonics for years, so your lists tell me nothing that I don't know already.

I responded to the often repeated lie by Mrz that,
We have 44 spoken sounds in our language (depending on accent) but only 26 letters in the alphabet so have a problem.^

There is nothing untruthful in that statement.

Perhaps masha will tell us how many letters there are in the alphabet if there aren't 26? and how many spoken sounds in English if there aren't 44 (depending on accent)?

Perhaps you know how we can have a system of one letter representing one sound masha? but in my mind 26/44 doesn't work ...

Creating another 18 letters will certainly take spelling reform to a whole new level

didn't we try that? ... let me see wasn't it called the Initial Teaching Alphabet

Obviously they didn't go far enough and roll ITA out to the entire nation, adults included.

Incidently, I've just googled ITA to see what it actually looked like. It looks much more readable than I was expecting based on what I've heard about it, although obviously totally useless in terms of developing some sort of familiarity/memory of words that you've already read a lot. Had a surprising amount of difficulty with the word 'coubois' though. To the point that I had to use context of a paragraph to work out what it could be.

From what I've heard & seen of ITA it was very successful in one way as children learned to read very easily with it. The problem was transition to books written with conventional spelling. Some children were fine, some were totally b*ggered up by it

Please, what is 'coubois'? I'm guessing 'cowboys'...