Phonics: How to explain split e diagraph?

[QuiteQuietly]

Doing phonics at home with DD2 (Y1) and finally getting somewhere with it. But I am stuck now on how to explain the split e diagraph eg a-e in came, i-e in time. I have asked at school, but the teacher says the best way is just to be familiar with words where it is used and then "get a feeling" as to how it works. This approach to reading hasn't got us very far, hence tackling phonics at home.

I read somewhere online that eg in came the a-e should be together (so /ae/) but were squabbling so the m jumped in the middle. But this doesn't seem to work for lots of words. Are there different rules for different circumstances?

Before anyone jumps on me, we are not prepping for the phonics test - I truly hope she fails it in order to give the school a kick up the backside. I am just trying to address her lack of reading ability. She started y1 struggling with stage 1 books and her main intervention at school this year has been learning HWF on squeebles with a TA. My eldest two picked up reading by sight before school so phonics have not been so much of an issue to me before now.

Thinking more about this, how do you explain one, done and gone (all different pronunciations of "one") when contrasted with bone, lone, cone, phone, hone etc. Teaching that the first three are "tricky" but the rest conform to the o-e diagraph rule is surely easier than making up (different) rules to explain the other three?

You haven't explained long/short masha truth is they are different sounds with the same spelling why complicate things with inaccurate labels

Quietly
If u are happy with your way of explaining split digraphs, stick with it, but English spelling is is about as unsystematic as u can get.

I speak 5 languages fairly fluently and get by in 2 others (English, German, Russian, French, Lithuanian; Spanish, Italian). None of the other 6 are spelt as unpredictably as English. And learning to read them is vastly easier than English, because they don't have different pronunciations for identical sounds, apart from a few very rare exceptions.

It was certainly not the simplicity of its spelling which made English the world's most learned 2nd language, but the might of the British empire and the simplicity of its grammar. Compared to other languages, it has almost no grammar at all. So learning to speak it at a basic level is easy. But learning to read with the likes of 'on, only, once', 'does, toes, shoes', or 'come, home, move' and writing with 'blue, shoe, flew, through' and 'bed, said, head' is fiendishly difficult and takes vastly longer than in other alphabetically written languages.

I ended up carrying out a detailed analysis of the English spelling system, because i wanted to know exactly how irregular/unpredictable it is.

You haven't explained long/short masha truth is they are different sounds with the same spelling why complicate things with inaccurate labels

Starlover strangly 6 & 7 year olds don't find it a problem if taught systematically and accurately from the start rather than introducing silly rules like "magic e makes the vowel say it's name" em no it doesn't in too many words ..."when two vowels go out walking the first one does the talking ... and it says it's name" au? ou? oi? ...wrong again!
Be precise and you don't have exceptions to the rules because there aren't any!

What complicates learning to read English is mainly that the letters a, e, i, o and u have two main sounds and that there is no reliable way of telling which they are, because doubled consonants are used so erratically.

Without irregular doubling (reggae - regular), no surplus -e endings (have) and no misuse of letters (many, pretty, some), the system would be easy to use and explain,
e.g. fat, fate, fatty; them, theme, lemming; bit, bite, bitten; pop, pope, popper; cut, cute, cutter.

It is difficult only because of its many irregularities.

U don't like the short/long terminology for the above, but most people have no trouble with it.

English is what it is and we have to deal with in the most effective manner. Your approach make a complex code into an unwieldy monster. Tame it and make it work rather than be negative at every opportunity!

I've asked MN to delete the multiple posts sorry

Mrz, English is indeed what it is, but English spelling could easily be made less chaotic.

But i agree that for the time being, we have to help children cope with it as best we can.

The open vowel method (vowel, single consonant, vowel) turns short a, e, i, o and u into long,
or into /ai/, /ee/, /igh/, /oa/ as in toad and 'yoo' more often than not
(hale, halo; here, hero; bite, biro; sole, solo; tube, tuba), but words in which it does not work are trickier:
came - camel, even - seven, hide - hideous, cope - copy, duty - study.

U clearly know much more about how best to help children with them. It would be nice if u explained it for parents on here.

It could be changed masha (I don't agree that's it chaotic as there is method in the madness that is English spelling which reflects our history ...but unlikely to change in the near future so harping on about ifs and buts helps so one.

Statslover a good phonics programme teaches children to read, spell and write because it starts from the sounds of their own language. It then takes them in logical steps teaching how each of the 44 or so sounds in the English language can be spelt, starting from the simple to the complex as the child becomes more skilled.

Children are taught the basic concepts :

 written language is a representation of spoken language and letters are spellings of sounds
 a sound can be spelt using one, two, three, or four letters - examples are: m a n, shop, l igh t and  eigh t
most sounds can have more than one spelling- the sound /ae/, spelt as  in 'came', can be represented as  in 'baby',  in 'paid',  in 'eight',  in 'day',  in 'they',  in 'break',  in 'veil'.  ( in straight  in ballet)
the same spellings can represent more than one sound:  can be the sound /e/ in 'head', /a-e/ in 'break', or /ee/ in 'seat'

they are also taught the skills of:

segment, or separate sounds in words for spelling
blend, or push sounds together to form words for reading
(manipulate sounds: take sounds out and put sounds into words -if you want to read feather and try /ee/ take out the /ee/ and try /e/ to read the word)

no tricky words, no nonsensical rules that only work some of the time just knowledge and skills.

I found with both of my DDs that it helped to draw a little arch connecting the split digraph letters. Both of mine were quite visual learners, so maybe that's why it helped them.

I used to put dots under individual sounds and dashes under di/tri/etc.graphs. Not for all words, of course, but the ones that were harder to read. Scroll down at the website below - it has some examples of what I mean.
ffks1.primaryblogger.co.uk/phonics-and-spelling/

?, ? and ?..lol.. what is a fleeting vowel?

Thanks Mrz. I think perhaps you have misunderstood my point. I (mostly!) understand, and fully support, English reading and spelling being taught phonetically in the way you suggest - it is the way I was taught and the way my DC have been taught. What I refer to as "rules" are not the sayings you quoted above, but what you refer to as phonics - for example, teaching children that the group of letters "igh" make the sound "I" is, in a sense, teaching them a rule.

And I still don't see how you teach using a phonics approach and avoid exceptions entirely. Whether you teach a child that "through" is a tricky word which reads "throo" or that, unusually, in through the "ough" combination is "oo", amounts to the same thing. Either way, the child's needs to learn that there is something different about the word through. To take another of your examples above "eigh" does indeed make the sound ay, except of course in "height", when it doesn't!

OP -

It is not easy for children to assimilate ALL the rules, exceptions, variations and 'whatever' that are needed to reliably learn to read and spell English.

However, the following publication does go a long way to clarifying things, and in a way that is very accessible to children. You might find it a worthwhile investment:

An inexpensive and easy to use book, that can encourage children with reading, spelling and writing, and really help them to understand Phonics, is reviewed in the MN Book Reviews section. Just search ‘Phonics’.

To be clear we wouldn't teach a child that makes the sound 'I' we would teach that there are different ways to spell the sound /ie/ they would learn all the alternative spellings and read and spell words containing the sound /ie/ pie, fly, mine, night, kind, buy (Tai, eye, heist, Maya, bye, height, island).
We would do that for all 44 sounds of the English language so children have to learn 176ish most common spelling patterns of our language ... a most doable task when you consider that there are now over one million words in the Oxford English Dictionary - impossible task to learn all.
If they know the alternatives and they can blend and segment the sounds in words they can accurately read any word that's in their spoken vocabulary and make very plausible attempts at spelling words (initially they may not choose the correct alternative but then it's the role of the adult to supply the correct alternative and the more times they read and write the correct version then the process will become automatic).

Just to add if you teach one word as one "tricky" (whole) word then the child may be able to read and spell one word ... if on the other hand you teach the child how the sounds are represented in that word they have a whole bank of knowledge that can be applied to all other words that contain the same sound representation. One word or many?

Ferguson
It is indeed not easy for children to assimilate ALL the rules, exceptions, variations and 'whatever' that are needed to reliably learn to read and spell English.
That's why children take an average of 3 years to become modestly fluent readers and at least 10 years to approach basic spelling proficiency.

Mrz
Most of the 1 million words in the OED nobody knows or uses. Many of them are not even English. When i tried to compile a basic list (e.g. including 'work', but not derivatives like 'working, workings' as well) that an average 16-yr-old can be expected to have come across, i could not find more than 7,000. - So in that sense there is much less to learn than u claim.

But English uses 205 different spellings for its 44 sounds (not 176), and even if a child can give u all the different ways a sound is spelt (e.g. the 12 for /ee/: ee, ea, e-e, e, i-e, ei, ie, eo, i, ey, is, ay - see, tea, eve, me, machine, weird, thief, people, ski, key, debris, quay), they still have to learn which one applies to each of the 452 common words with that sound. Nor will they know how pronounce the ones with variable sounds (treat, great, threat; people, leopard, leotard...the, me...they, key ...) until they have seen those words a few times.

After a bit of basic phonics, children really learn to read and write simply with lots of word by word practice, going over them again and again. As u say,
the more times they read and write the correct version then the process will become automatic.

But your basic list is flawed masha ... you work backwards from the spelling to the sound rather than how language evolved - speech first! Try it...it makes much more sense.

As to no one using all the words in the OED ... correct but how do you determine which words individuals will use ... do we limit our vocabulary to the words on your lists? or do we set up a vocabulary tzar who allocates words on a need to know basis? or do we accept that no one can predict what words will be necessary vocabulary in our future lives and roles?

MMmomKK A fleeting vowel is one that disappears in certain cases - it's often only there in some mutations to stop too many consonants in a row. So in Russian ????? - ?? ????? . In locative case, the -e on the end means you lose the -o- before the -? . Lots of languages have them - I believe there are a few in English but I can't bring them to mind right now!