People who know about phonics - how on earth do you explain the difference in pronunciation...

[emkana]

between

lemon

and

demon.

IME, they usually work out the word from the context of what they are reading. When something like that comes up and a child looks at me, I get them to read the whole sentence and then ask them what they think it might say based on how they sound it out. They usually get it. Or, I just say 'ahh, this is a funny/tricky word, it's xxxx' and I just tell them.

Ds1 has had no problem with this - he's in yr1 now.

I do Jolly Phonics with dd and there are certain "tricky" words of which "one" is the first which have to be learnt by sight.

So those of us who say we do phonics also incorporate look and sday but in a structured way at the start.

We teach the 42 sounds alongside a few selected tricky words and then progress from that.

It is strange what words children struggle with, isn't it? At one point DS was forever getting was and saw muddled. He is further on than that now, but I was surprised last night that he struggled with penalty - because it was a book about football and DS is obsessed with football so penalty is well within his vocab and fairly straightforward phonetically. He has got to the point where he can sometimes read words but struggle to actually say them and gets his tongue all twisted - extraordinarily, for instance, which tends to appear in Mr Men books. Also has a black spot about my friend Eleanor, whom he invariably refers to as Enilor, although 2yo DD manages it OK.

I can't convince my 10 year old it is 'even though' and not 'even know'.

my 5 year old confuses said and was - which totally baffles me !

we call them 'tricky words' some you just have to learn

lemon .. follows the rules

demon .. because its a tricky word .. doesn't

can you spot the tricky words?

(By the way what kind of sentence brings up lemon and demon huh?)

throckenholt I have been told its extremely common for children to confuse smaller, high frequency words because they think they know them

hence DS has issues with 'was' and 'saw', 'on' and 'no' .. because his mind notices the letters but he switches them

its a phase

Just remembered DS had on and no as well but not for as long as was and saw and he also had there and three which I found more understandable.

I only thought of lemon and demon because I was watching the Da Vinci Code with my mum, who is German, and she couldn't believe that demon was pronounced as it was, having previously thought when reading it that it rhymed (sp?) with lemon.

it does rhyme with lemon when it is in demonstrate - there you go - English is a very quirky language - because it is a combination of germanic, latin and celtic languages - with a bit of indian and african thrown in from colonial days (eg bungalow).

I think I am lucky to be a native speaker - much easier to learn to spell in German, Spanish or French as a second language !