Phonics help please!

[PastaPot]

This homework, aimed at 4 year olds, has me completely flummoxed! Does anyone know what the picture for the ff is supposed to be?

Off?

It's off

Whatever was the 'homework' task?

Sorry for the delay in replying. Thanks for your help, silly me! I was thinking about different words for switch and finger that ended in ff.

The homework is just general phonics learning using different games.

What could you learn from that?

How to read

I'm intrigued hiw it could be used

Sorry I'm not really sure what you're asking. These are phonics which are letter sounds that are blended to read words.

I teach phonics but your illustration has me completely baffled as to how it could be used for homework.

Wouldn't it would be difficult for the child to actually extract any phonetic learning that would fit with their knowledge at this point from it? And it's all very mixed up. First sounds, last sounds...it would be a better exercise getting the children to sound out the missing first letter (so 'o') in this case, to me. But then 'lolly' and 'orange' are much too complicated.

I realise you weren't asking for a debate, mind you

It's just a sound chart for the children to learn the phonics. I'm using it to make games like pairs and bingo at the moment.

Mimsy I agree. My DS has quite a good understanding of the sounds at the beginning of the words but I'm not actually sure how I'm supposed to teach him the sounds at the ends of the words. I haven't been placing much emphasis on those so far (mainly because I didn't know what hat bloody picture was!).

Oops I mean that not hat

Sorry I thought it was something that had been sent home with your child that you didn't understand.
I suppose im questioning the value of the game and resource.

It was sent home from school. The full chart is here. It was sent home with a few ideas of how we could use it but I get the impression it's to help the parents understand what the children will be learning, if that makes sense? It was just that one picture I didn't understand.

Re the question up three about how this could be used for homework - surely just sitting together with the child and going over the sounds is a good start? We used to get similar when dd was in P1, to reinforce what they had been studying in class.

It's been very helpful in fact as know I know how to pronounce the letters when we're reading together.

Up thread I meant

but I get the impression it's to help the parents understand what the children will be learning

That makes far more sense! It's an awful shame, though, that it is such a badconfusing chart. It isn't portaying 'sounds' at all, it's portraying 'graphemes', i.e. the letters which represent/spell sounds. Just the very fact that it is titled 'Phase 2 Sounds' makes me wonder if the teacher really has a secure grasp of phonics.

There are only 18 'sounds' represented on the chart but 23 graphemes. I trust you've noted that /k/ is spelled 3 different ways, /s/ is spelled 2 ways, as are /f/ & /l/. It's immaterial to your DC where the spellings come in a word as, presumably, all they have to do is to learn to automatically respond to a grapheme with the sound it spells.

Has the school done anything at word level yet?

Then I would question the value of doing that in isolation sleepyfergus.

Well, we've no idea whether it's being done 'in isolation' and OP only came to ask about one grapheme.

We've got a phonics session for parents next week so hopefully all will become clear. I didn't realise it was such an emotive subject!

I was replying to sleepyfergus' suggestion of how they would be used meditrina which is why I addressed it to her/him.

It's an open board, and people can join in (if you want a closed conversation, I don't think there are any options on MN other than using PMs).

And there is no indication, from OP, sleepyfergus, or anyone else, that the activities they describe were done 'in isolation'.

I'm not sure I'd have noticed the title and I'm usually quite fussy about phonics resources.

The one thing I would watch out for, OP, is him learning to recognise/match the pictures rather than the letters. If you are going to play pairs/snap/bingo etc, you might be better off ditching that chart and trying to find some plainer grapheme cards/letter tiles online.

I'm not sure I'd have noticed the title and I'm usually quite fussy about phonics resources.

It's one of my many bugbears, Rafa; the misuse of the terminology. So many people say that their DC is 'learning their sounds'; they're not, they know 'their sounds'. Unless they are congenitally dumb they have been practising their sounds since they were a few months old. What they really mean is that their DCs are learning their letter/sound correspondences (the way the sounds are represented by letters/groups of letters). It also gives the mnistaken impression that there are hundreds of 'sounds' when, in fact, there are only 44ish (depending on accent). However, I don't blame the posters who say it as they've probably got it from their DC's teachers, who really ought to know better...

I asked the OP about word work because although I don't quite share mrz's antipathy to learning correspondences in isolation I do think it is pretty pointless to learn some correspondences without also learning what they are used for i.e. reading and spelling words.

I'll be really interested to know what the OP is told about phonics and reading at the forthcoming meeting for parents.