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

You are right...I think. I made it cowboys after I thought about it

What confused me was the 'ois' at the end. I grew up somewhere where whilst English pretty much the only language used these days many place names, surnames, road names etc. are in an old form of French. It's not particularly uncommon for me to be reading a piece of English text with patois nouns in. I think I must have seen the 'ois' and then made a connection that it isn't English and changed the pronunciation of the 'ou' accordingly.

I've not really thought about how often I switch between the two before.

Re i.t.a.

The oridginal 1963-4 studdy wos suposed to last just wun yeer and test the theeory that moddernising English spelling wuld enable children to lern to reed and rite faster - because in 1953 the House of Commons had passed a Spelling Reform Bill (but without guvernment suport, so it wos not eevn put befor the Lords).

Because the teechers hoo used i.t.a. with 835 children saw that it helped children to lern to reed and rite much faster, thay had the daft idea that using i.t.a. for a yeer wuld enable children to cope with the iregularrities of English spelling mor eesily afterwards. - It genneraly had the opposit effect.

It was a shame that Pitman's i.t.a. did not meerly make English spelling mor reggular. It changed several of the main English spelling patterns, especially the open long vowel patterns of a-e, i - e, o -e and u-e.

Surely it's a bit early to be drinking......

There are two basic issues with the repeated posting of lists on phonics thread:

a) they seem to be a polemic for spelling reform, not anything to do with learning to read the language as it is now. Everyone agrees that phoneme/grapheme correspondences are not one-to-one (in either direction).

b) it is ordered by sight (ie what graphemes look like). This was fashionable with look and see/rote learning approach. Phonics is not that. Phonics is all about how the language sounds. The groups are therefore by sound.

ITA was indeed akin to a spelling reform as a tool to learn to read. It did not, as Rafa noted above, prepare children to read the language as it actually is (many could not make the leap easily) and indeed was very short lived because the outcomes were poor. All the innovative reading approaches of the 20th century have had poorer outcomes that the centuries old phonics method.

I agree with you on point a) scaevola, masha's spamming of the boards is far more about her own agenda than being of any help to anyone wanting advice. They are often confusing and irrelevant and a link to an alphabetic code chart if necessary would be more succinct and easier to understand.

I'm not sure about point 2. I don't think a list of graphemes ordered by what they look like is the same as look and say at all. One of the complexities of the English language is that the same grapheme can be used to represent different sounds. It's a key skill that children need to know for reading unknown words. I have a similar list for my own reference, I think PI have one in their resources and a large chunk of phase 5 of letters and sounds focuses specifically on this.

I didn't mean to suggest that the same grapheme must always be the same sound. I know correspondences are not one-to-one either way round.

I meant simply that phonics is all about the meaningful sounds of the language, and the ways to code/decode those sounds when written. The key is the sounds of the language.

I'm not sure about point 2. I don't think a list of graphemes ordered by what they look like is the same as look and say at all.

I can see what scaevola means by point 2. If you look at old spelling resources from the height of the Look & Say era you will find words grouped in much the same way as Marsha groups them, by appearance rather than by the sounds spelled. There is still a great deal of misunderstanding of the alphabetic code.

When I was trying to find a count of the graphemes used in English (because the charts used in SP programmes don't list every grapheme, just the commonest & most useful),I found a Wiki page which listed about 400 but there were a number of errors on it, mostly, it seemed, because the compiler didn't fully understand that graphemes spelled sounds.

Because English poses spelling and decoding problems, i posted 2 lists:

1. showing all the different spellings for 44 sounds (see page 1) and
2. (on page 1 and also higher up on this page again) the letters and letter strings which have different pronunciations.

To show all the different spellings (first list), i had to use 331 words. But because several spellings are used for more than one sound (e.g. o in on, only, once, other), the total number of different English spellings is merely 205. But the use of one letter or letter string for different sounds is what causes reading difficulties.

But your spellings aren't the sounds represented in the words just patterns which aren't helpful in the slightest!

Mixing ea representing sounds, with ea as part of eau and ear is pointless and confusing.

Marsha's lists aren't meant to be helpful, mrz. Just scary..

I do realise that helpfulness wouldn't suit her purpose

code charts which make sense [[http://www.alphabeticcodecharts.com/free_charts.html]]

Ahem - let's try that again:

www.alphabeticcodecharts.com/free_charts.html

WTAF is 'ccle'? Was that supposed to be a sound or did you just pluck some letters out of thin air? And how is bundle an example of it?

Controversial perhaps but for fear of messing it up, I'm afraid I left all that to their teachers. Better learn it right first time from a trained professional than have a rank amateur (me) messing about with these important building blocks.

From helping out in YR I know enough DC who learned to write in block capitals at home, or consistently say 'ell' instead of 'lll' which makes blending harder, or insist that 'oo' is sounded like 'loop' and never like 'look', all because of work done at home with their parents in good faith. None of it ruins their education, obviously, but why give them bad habits to undo this early in their learning? I'd rather wait a few weeks and use the teacher's expertise.

Er... goblin is just... goblin. With an /i/. No schwa.

Ditto divide. It doesn't sound like de-vide.

Ditto endure - doesn't sound like indulge. Unless you say it wrong.

I'm sure the sounds at the end of ordinary are not the same as those at the end of century.

mild, kind, climb and sign are all the same way of writing the sound /ie/ not 4 different ways.

I should not have read that list. I'm going to be picking it apart all night now.

Even if the lists worked, I'm not sure many people appreciate being 'listed at' at every given opportunity. I am certain that it is a kind of affliction that Masha suffers from, and as such she deserves sympathy but needs to stop spamming.

Many people have access to much better charts, but don't post the entire thing at every given opportunity, sometimes multiple times on one thread - or even a link to one. It's getting ridiculous.

I'm going to start reporting those lists as spam now.

That's 4 on this thread now I think. Did she not get reported before for spamming the board with links to her website? I though she was banned from doing that but the lists were deemed OK.

I will admit, that as much as TES is virtually dead and unused since they redesigned it, it is much nicer to be able to read without havinng lists posted everywhere.

Other posters should also report if they find the lists intrusive to Masha's - and others' - points.