Resources for phonics

[Arkadia]

Hi,

Some time ago I read a thread in here about a child who could read, but would fail a phonics test. After giving it some thought I have come to realise that my DD1 is exactly in this situation. She reads pretty well and with a lot of expression, however when she comes across a word she doesn't know, she simply cannot decode it.

She does not know her phonics.

She is now P3 (Y2) and really loves reading, but she reads like me... When I come across a word I don't know , I need to look it up, unless it is very easy; I can't decode words and I look at them as a whole, a bit as if they were ideograms (I was never thought phonics and English is not my first language, but my vocabulary is very good by any standard, so I get by easily enough).

So, my question is: is there any resource I can use to help her improve her/my knowledge of phonics? It cannot be too "small children oriented", otherwise she will feel belittled.
On top of that I hope that a better knowledge of phonics will help her with her spelling which is absolutely appalling.

Interestingly enough, although I have been following what my kids have been doing at school, I never managed to learn phonics. Perhaps because I've never really seen the point of it. Instead DD2 has an instinctive understanding of phonics, so, though not so expressive, she can easily read words she does not know or understand (so, often when she is reading, I have to stop her to ask if she knows the meaning of a certain word...)

And yes, for the teacher everything is hunky-dory...

"I cannot see how on this test a score of less a 100% can be deemed acceptable, especially if you pretty much know what you will be asked."
You don't have a clue what will be asked it could be any of the thousands of words found in the English dictionary. I'm not sure where you get this idea.

No one knows how to pronounce a word they've never heard before (we can usually get quite close applying what we know but it's true for all of us from beginner readers to experts) but remember phonics isn't elocution

Mrz, I have only seen this test, and all the questions in this test are objectively easy. There is no hydraulic, pneumothorax or archipelago ;) I suppose that the words are taken from the fry list or such like, so they are going to be high frequency words that a below average native speaker is expected to know (but obviously not to spell). It could happen that you don't know 1 or 2, but after that you are making excuses... Do you think it is acceptable to think that the expectation is to know only about 1/2 of them after THREE years of school (and in my case, way less)?

"I suppose that the words are taken from the fry list or such like, so they are going to be high frequency words" it would be a huge error for a teacher to think that the test is going to be made up of high frequency words it could be absolutely anything based on the phonics taught in Y1 and Y2 (which is all the sounds and their spellings found in English).

Perhaps so, but this time around I am hard pushed to find a difficult word.
Based on what my DD did "office" and "lazy" were difficult, but I think there was no other crossover.
Had she got "discombobulated" wrong, they fine, but "sky"...

I really don't get what your post, OP.
If your child is at expected level, good. If above great.
What else would you like, really?
It's not even relevant to you, since you live in Scotland. You would like to see a lot of English children fail expected standard by setting standard higher? Or are you saying education in England is rubbish because they can even bring the standard higher?
If you aim high for your DDs, great.
Some children may struggle, some do it easily. Why does it matter so much to you what is expected levels in England?

*what you mean by your post

*can't

Sorry so many typos.

I am, tbh, a little puzzled. Your DD is probably older than the intended target age of the test, as school in Scotland starts later. The very oldest a year 2 child can be in May is 7 and 8 months, whereas the vast majority of p3s will be over 8 at this point in the year, and some could be 9 after deferred entry (I can't remember if you've mentioned yiour DD1's age). Reception is more akin to nursery / kindergarten / final pre-school year in scotland, and certainly P1 is much more like year 1 in formal learning style.

Your DD got 8/20 [and not due to minor mistakes, due to a range of mistakes that show she does not understand phonics and has no good strategies fo spelling or reading unknown words] in a spelling test intended for children probably a year younger than she is, with possibly fewer years of formal schooling, and you are complaining that the test is too EASY,??

I would also point out that the KS1 SPAG test was, in the end, not used for statutory reporting because of incompetent leaks,. thus we don't know what percentage of children actually gained 'expected' in this test. It is entirely possible that that figure could have been 80 or 90%, as it is a test with a fixed threshold not a test with a fixed % getting a certain grade.

The column on the right tells you what phonic knowledge is being tested

"Had she got "discombobulated" wrong,". I'd be very worried as it's quite simple although poly syllabic dis com bob u late d exactly as it sounds nothing to test the child's spelling ability. Don't confuse word length with spelling difficulty.

Agree with mrz - the really tricky words are ones like rhythm or yacht with rare g-p pairs.

If you don't know enough to teach your child yourself, why do you consider yourself able to comment on the issue in such depth?

cant,
Your DD got 8/20 [and not due to minor mistakes, due to a range of mistakes that show she does not understand phonics and has no good strategies fo spelling or reading unknown words] in a spelling test intended for children probably a year younger than she is, with possibly fewer years of formal schooling, and you are complaining that the test is too EASY,??

Well, wouldn't you say that the test IS easy? Had she scored 100% I would have shrugged and said... big deal, it is hardly difficult.. And wouldn't you say that making that many mistakes despite three years at school AND being slightly older than her English counterparts is rather worrying? She is actually going to be 8 in a couple months' time, so had she been in England in theory (but most likely not in practice) she would have been Y3.

I have to say that having her little sister (P1) getting 17/20 on the same test (actually, almost 18/20) doesn't make things easier.

Would you say that everything is OK? Would you say that no action needs to be taken. We just wait for things to move at their own pace and whatever will happen will happen it is going to be fine?

Great, hardly great depths. I see is that my DD, AFTER THREE YEARS OF SCHOOL, is pretty much incapable of writing anything that could be understood (the sloppy handwriting doesn't help either) or at least not look twee (thanks to the "cute factor" that a small child would evoke).

Irvine,
If your child is at expected level, good. If above great.

Wouldn't you say that her spelling is WAY below what the expected level is?
Wouldn't you expect an almost 8 year old to be able to communicate in writing with at least a certain degree of competence?

"And wouldn't you say that making that many mistakes despite three years at school " no I would say her mistakes are down to poor phonic knowledge and attempting to recall words as wholes (glov showed she's not using phonics but has remembered that there is o an error using phonics would probably be gluv )

Apologies, Arkadia, it may have been the tone in which your previous posts were made that made me pick up the wrong end of the stick.

They gave the impression, not that you were worried about your DD, but that you were criticising the tests, and by implication all those other children who took the tests, rather than recognising your child's difficulties.

Regardless of the test, and whatever its difficulty in any 'absolute' sense, your DD1 has a problem with phonics, particularly its use for encoding (you said she was OK with the Year 1 Phonics test, so her basic decoding 'in isolation' isn't too bad, though she may not use it routinely when 'reading' a longer text) and could usefully go right back to the beginning, perhaps by using the phonics app linked way back by mrz.

That's alright cant.
I cannot get the app linked above. I get an errore message because I don't have in iPad (I think).

Mrz, that is EXACTLY my point.

Besides, in the other three parts of the paper she scored almost 100% (and to a lesser degree, so did her little sister), which makes me think that the problem is not the difficulty/easiness of the test, but her basic knowledge and understanding of phonics (i.e. the problem is not within her, but with the school).

So the point you are making is that she seems to have a difficulty not with 'English as a subject overall' but with phonics in particular, in particular phonics for spelling?

I think it would genuinely be interesting to get her to do the two reading papers as well, to see to what degree her difficulties in decoding complex words in reading also affects the detailed comprehension of what she reads. Otherwise you might be tempted to focus very heavily on phonics for encoding, only to discover that there is an issue with her decoding that affects her reading comprehension too.

I'd forget about her spelling the words correctly on paper for now and ask her to tell you the sounds she can in each word to check where the problem is.

Back to the glove example children who are relying heavily on visual memory will say the sounds represented by the letters rather than the sounds they hear

I'd suggest https://www.phonicbooks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/complex-phonic-code.pdf

I am not sure if the problem is within her or the school, since your other dd is doing fine in the same school.
I would start from basic phonics. Good luck.

If you need a spelling program - apple and pears is a good one ( use placement test to figure out where to start)- they also do a good reading program dancing bears both are straight forward to follow.

Teach your monster how to read seems to get mine practising a bit even my 11 year old.

Mine went to a school were spelling was supposed to emerge and where they said they taught phonics but used multi-cuing, search light, and sight words. I ended up using the above resources, as well as the book people for song bird books and reading chest for decodable at their level phonic books at home as nothing I said to the school made any difference.

www.spelfabet.com.au/ - (there aren't any restrictive pages that I have ever come across) but lots of information. If you work through the program - go to shop and work books - you buy a pdf which you download then print out. Plus if you hunt around there are suggestion for other phonic based resources. The where to start page shows it's not just for adults.

Not phonics based but have found uk.ixl.com/ela/word-analysis part seem to be helping my older child generally - I suspect it's reinforcing the previous word splitting work she's done.

Mrs, thank you. That is a very thorough list. I will have to work through it and see what inspires me. :)

Small update. We have done the first reading comprehension test and DD1 found it easy. The difficult part was actually marking it because there were some answers I wasn't at all sure how to mark (in fairness that was DD2 who in a couple of occasions went off the tangent :D ).
Anyway, in the next few days well try the last one. That looks a bit daunting, but maybe it isn't. After all I read that the national average of the reading papers is identical to the maths ones.

So, the problem seems to be isolated to spelling capabilities (or lack thereof).

OT
For some little comic relief, DD2 was doing her homework and she wrote "brang" and I just couldn't work out what on earth she meant, until it dawned on me... brang is the past tense of "b-ring". I have to say I had a really good laugh (and didn't even correct it as I thought was priceless :) )
/OT

So, we are now in this brave new world of phonics, but I am SO out of my depths. This morning we were trying to use the Elkonin boxes (never heard of them till a few days ago when DD2's teacher introduced us to them. I had to look it up on Google because I had no idea how to spell it...). In short, instead that spelling a word, you spell out the sounds, so if you had "chair", you would have ch-ai-r.

So this morning I was trying to do that with "journey" with DD1 (-ey- is this week's phoneme), but I didn't know how to do it. I am familiar with the phonetic alphabet (Nobel prize to the inventor, please) and I was looking for a /:ℇ/ (mirror it, please) sound but couldn't find it. So, how do I deal with -our-?