Phonics problems?

[ihearttc]

DS2 is nearly 5.5 (November birthday) and in Reception. He started in september knowing some of the JP sounds but could not blend at all. He has progressed quite well well and is currently on yellow ORT with some stage 4 PM Starter books.

He is reading well and quite fluently but is really struggling with phonics. He was fine with the single sounds and is ok with some of the digraphs and trigraphs such as ch, sh, ee, oo, th but struggling with some of the vowel ones such as oi, ai, ear, air etc. He can't seem to see them in the word if that makes sense? I think the only reason he is reading as well as he is, is due to the fact that he has a very logical way of thinking so he guesses what word is likely to be there. For example he read "chair" this afternoon in a book yet if I show him the trigraph "air" on its own he wouldn't know what it is despite them practicising every day at school and we do it lots at home as well. His brother was exactly the same and never ever got phonics but was always a fantastic reading so Im not overly concerned but DS1 is 11 so they didn't have the phonics test when he was in Y1.

Ive got a load of the ORT phonics books to see if that helps but it is painful listening him to read them...one is called Toads in the Road (they are 2 levels below cause Ive gone backwards to get his basic phonic knowledge better) and he litererally sounds out toad T O A D rather than T OA D yet on the next page he knew straight away it was toad even though he has never encountered the word before.

I don't suppose Im explaining myself very well at all but I suspect he sees the word as a whole rather than one to be segmented which I know isn't a great way of learning to read and Im struggling how to help him.

Ive just had a look at letters and sounds and Im still no wider where he is on there. They have definitely done those digraphs (or graphemes Im not sure what you call them!) cause he has brought them home but he can't seem to retain them. However he can read all the tricky words on phase 5 with ease.

I think I might invest in some of those dandelion readers to use along side the ones from school...he is reading a book a night at the moment and the school books only get changed once a week so they will give him more stuff to read at least.

DD4 is following RWI and I think those little sayings really help her.

If she's writing she'll stop and recite one sometimes and then carry on. It clearly helps her remember which letters are in the sound. It was also really useful last year in helping her form her letters - down the plait and give her a curl etc etc.

DD was like this for a month or two and it was really frustrating. Some she could do but things like "air" and "ough" baffled her. The only thing I can think is that, as they are so long and can take up so much of a word, she seemed to think she should sound then out individually. I think "sh", "ch" etc are easier as you only have to look one letter ahead to see the other bit of the digraph (if that's what it is) whereas with the longer ones you're looking much further ahead. For example, you've got to read "thought"... you see "t" and know how it sounds but then spot the "h" and remember it's "th" and give yourself a pat on the back. Whilst remembering the "th", you now look at the next letter which is "o"... wait, there's a "u" next to it, it's "ou" so you've got "thou" and are half way through the word and thinking about the "g" when the adult says something along the lines of "remember "ou" change when they've got "g" and "h" attached to them so you're scrabbling around in your brain trying to remember what sound they all make together whilst not losing track of the "th" at the beginning.
Or at least that it what I imagine it is like and therefore why it is so hard with the longer sounds. DD is now in Yr1, on ORT 9 and mainly sight reads so it all came together but there were a few stages where I was mentally tearing my hair out!

OP would flashcards be an idea, you could make them, where the digraphs and trigraphs are on one card - might help him to recognise them as a unit within words. Also we got an idea on here about using a highlighter to hunt the digraph in a body of text which DD enjoyed.

This is what is did

I made my own flashcards using the Jolly phonic word bank - I just copied and pasted the words onto paper in a medium size font and cut them out.
jollylearning.co.uk/gallery/jolly-phonics-word-bank/

I used a highlighter pen to shade the digraph and practiced them in batches - so a good few days doing the oa words and then the ch words etc. Those letters became linked in DS's mind and he was then able to spot them easily when they weren't highlighted.

The Dandelion Launchers are slightly easier (less to read per page)

Schools use a variety of programmes which introduce the sounds in a slightly different order. If the school uses Letters and Sounds the aim is to cover phases 2-4 in reception so should have introduced one spelling for all 44 sounds by this point in the year.

Oh... Same idea as bluespiral

Letters and sounds has flash cards ready to be printed

Earlyday. JP also do a set of word blending boxes with flashcards that are free to download. You could probably have saved yourself a bit of cutting and pasting. Still a lot of cutting out though.

jollylearning.co.uk/gallery/word-blending-boxes/

The Letters and Sounds programme has no resources but a commercial company has taken the name to sell their products. The company isn't connected to the official DfE publication

Mmm

From your list of digraphs, all are from phase 3 Letters and Sounds apart from ue and ou which are phase 5. Phase 5 introduces alternative spellings for the phase 3 digraphs and also covers previously learnt spellings of digraphs that make different sounds. (If that makes sense!) This is intended for year 1.

ue and ou are taught in Jolly Phonics, as are the other sounds that the OP has listed. It could be that they are using that.

If you are doing 1:1 work I'm not totally sure it matters, you just teach as and when the spelling comes up. It's when you are resourcing a whole class or KS you have to take a bit more care about mixing resources from different schemes. Even then it's manageable with a bit of organisation.

Haven't read the whole thread but my now 19yo DD who is a fantastic reader and studying for a degree in a top university STILL doesn't understand the rules of phonics! She never studied them at school as such - and was slow to learn to read and write until the age of 7 when everything seemed to click in place (after a short course of extra help in a dyslexic group - no dx at the stage). We then had her tested at age 14 mainly because she was due to start GCSEs and we were concerned about her spelling and reading aloud - she has visual dyslexia and visual processing disorder and has a spelling age of 11. Because she was reaching her targets her problems went undetected. There is a lot of info about both conditions and I would look into these for your son

When we went through the check list before her assessment I was really surprised with what she was struggling with -
Words moving
Lines of text melting into each other
Uneven spacing was a nightmare for her as end of words were joining beginning of words
Tracking from one line to next
Copying sentences down
There were a few more as well

I didn't mean to cause concern and that's why I've mentioned that my daughter who has these issues is doing very well academically - sorry OP if I have worried you

Suggesting that a child who is only halfway through reception might have a visual processing disorder because they haven't yet fully grasped phonics is utterly ridiculous.

Well that's me well and truly told then isn't it!

Thats a very good question Koh...I will try tomorrow but I have a feeling it would be "tod" or possibly "Tood". When he writes the letters are really well formed (his school teaches continuous cursive from reception) but he has no concept of how to spell words even phonetically yet he can spell "the" and "like" for some reason. All the words go into each other as if he is just continuously writing them down. I looked at some writing he did the other day and it went something like: The dinosw wos brn wt yllo spots on the tal.

Compared to other work that was on display it was much better it terms of neatness of writing but the layout and content of the work was probably the worst on display. Not sure if my expectations are too high though.

No thank you Quietly honestly its fine...I welcome all input.

He had huge huge problems visually recognising numbers until just before christmas so the possibility that there may be something else going on had crossed my mind as well. He still reads them if that makes sense so he says 1 and 1 is 11 rather than just saying 11.

No idea if thats relevant but it took a huge amount of hard work to get to this point with his numbers so Im assuming it will take a similar amount of hard work to get his phonics up to scratch.

Some children see the whole word and just recognise it. Others decode.

Play to his strengths at home. Work on his understanding of the text he reads.

Unless they have hyperlexia, all children end up decoding or they have an issue with reading. There's no way of reading an unknown word without it. At what point their problems become apparent depends on their other skills and the amount of close reading/reading in depth they are expected to do.

Quiet's DD was lucky. Most children who don't get phonics at all don't end up doing well academically.

Which isn't to say you should be worrying that your DS has a long term issue iheart. It's far to early to say anything at this stage. It's just a case of identifying what exactly he's struggling with specifically and tackling that. You never know it might just all fall into place with a bit of targeted extra practice. Especially if his confusion stems from some less than ideal teaching.

DD3 was very, very behind in reading until about 3 months ago. She is in year 2 and was on stage 3/4 books. I realised that her problem was confidence. She'd rather not read at all than read and get it wrong. She started to get caught out when she would ask a question about a sign in the road with a quite long name -she could clearly read it.

Now, she's pretty much caught up and just needs to develop the confidence to read fluently. She will still hesitate if she encounters an unfamiliar word because she doesn't know if her decoding of it is correct. It almost always is.

It's only anecdote, but I think that some children just take a while to get to that point of confidence.

Unfortunately, mixed methods confuse kids and dent their confidence. Not only that, kids who are perfectly capable with the correct systematic phonics teaching, get 'labelled' wrongly. I am a self taught mum and have used the phonics international resources to teach both my boys their alphabetic code and from this they can now read and write. The teaching of phonics in many schools is patchy at best. Its quite often down to parents to plug the gaps...once I printed Debbie's alphabetic code and got to grips with the sounds, the reading of both my boys accelerated. I see so many kids struggle unnecessarily.