Phonics question re trailing 'e's

[catkind]

Hi phonics folks - would really appreciate a couple of pointers.

I usually use sound buttons to help DC learn spellings, where you put a dot/underline each grapheme. I hope that's not a disapproved method - school just say look cover write check which without an intervening "think about the phonics" step I don't find helpful.

But how do I sound button words like believe, come, give where there's a random trailing e but not a usual split digraph sound? Do you teach it as a non-standard split spelling iee, oe, i_e, or as vowel sound ie, o, i and consonant sound ve, me, ve?

Goody, so if you say learning/mastering basic phonics skills are ridiculous, how do you think children learn all those words in later years? It maybe ok for easy reading in ks1, but how about ks2 +?

I didn't say that Irvine. I said that it's ridiculous to expect children to master a huge number of alternative sounds - some of which contradict other sounds rules - and then have to test them in order to decide a word.

Much easier to learn that 'come' breaks the split vowel digraph rule than to learn the rule in Y1 and then have to learn 'me' as a new spelling for the 'm' sound. Otherwise you wouldn't be able to learn how to spell 'come' for several years!

"Much easier to learn that 'come' breaks the split vowel digraph rule than to learn the rule" there isn't a split vowel rule for it to break. If you're teaching phonics systematically you teach words that contain the same sounds and sort into words with the same spelling for that sound.
"Otherwise you wouldn't be able to learn how to spell 'come' for several years!" Why would you think that?

In Y1 my dc were taught the split vowel digraph o_e for the sound 'owe'. (OK, don't call it a rule if you don't want to.) Then they could sound out home, bone etc. They had already learnt an alternative 'owe' sound oa. In that same year they were taught to spell come, by rote, because it does not fit into any of the phonemes that they were being taught.

At what point would you suggest learning that 'me' can sometimes be part of a split vowel and sometimes be the sound 'mm', before expecting children to be able to work out how to spell a common word?

Your child should have been taught how to decode come and some in reception, including knowing that the spelling o is the sound u and that me is a way to spell the sound m ...it doesn't take years

"Even the core of high frequency words which are not transparently decodable using known grapheme–phoneme correspondences usually contain at least one GPC that
is familiar. Rather than approach these words as though they were unique entities, it is advisable to start from what is known and register the ‘tricky bit’ in the word. Even the word yacht, often considered one of the most irregular of English words, has two of the three phonemes represented with regular graphemes. "

Procedure
Explain that there are some words which gave one,or sometimes two tricky letters.

Sound talk the word and repeat putting lines/buttons under each sound and blend them to read the word

Discuss the tricky bit of the word where the letters do not correspond to the sounds the children know (the o in come isn't the same sound as in cot)

No rote learning

I don't think they're using the phonics to /work out/ how to spell the word, they're using phonics as a powerful prompt as they memorise the spelling. So instead of remembering an arbitrary number of any of 26 letters, they know they only need a "c" spelling, a "u" spelling, and an "m" spelling, in that order. Much easier.

For example, going on visual memory DD came up with "heithg" instead of "height". Then applied her phonics and sorted those remembered letters into a spelling for "h", a spelling for "igh" and a spelling for "t" in that order. Job done, "height".

If she hadn't had the phonics tool she'd have been stuck with "heithg" and a niggling feeling it didn't look quite right.

I would say it works the other way, knowing the sounds and remembering which alternative spelling because of frequent exposure which is why leaving spellings uncorrected causes later difficulties.

DD is a summer born YR1, she appears to have had good phonics only teaching from the descriptions here in primary - although she's also highly able and has a very good ear for sounds and a wide vocabulary which has certainly helped I'm sure.

Her spelling is very good, lots of the complex words in her writing are correct, and would generally know the correct spelling when prompted even for those which are wrong (so it's the concentration on writing speed dropping accuracy, rather than lack of knowledge) She gets the majority of the spellings on CBBC's Top Class correct. She's certainly doing it by sound/phonics though, and then choosing the spelling from exposure to the words/similar words