Summer born reading

[walkalongjosie]

Hi.. I'm sure this has been done to death but interested to know if any other children like my DD. She's 4 not 5 til July and is in reception/foundation. She knows all the sounds and rhymes and can say them with no problem. The trouble is blending a word so f..o..g she would sound the letters fine but then say fot or fon for example
Some words she gets right so I guess it's just practice but getting her to sit and read can be tricky, she'll come and do it but only a couple of pages then starts to fidget. She's massively physical and would rather be outside up a tree or running around which I love and I have to admit I'm not pushing reading at home. We read every night in bed and we do read daily from her school book but that's it. Anyone else the same?

Don't feel concerned - most children are like that. Some will sit and meticulously work through pages and pages but in my experience, the vast majority would rather do just about anything else.

Sorry but patience wins the day with learning to read!

Brief story - a friend of ours had two DDs. DD1 was enthusiastic about reading and did plenty by herself, she didn't need much encouragement and now reads very well. They're very 'hippy' parents and did the same with DD2 only she couldn't face reading. The result was that as time slipped by, she was nowhere near where she needed to be going into Year 1 and failed her phonics test at the end of the year. She needed them to read with her, push her through it from the first day of reception but their general attitude together with the easy experience from DD1 prevented this. I remember her saying to me when DD2 was in Year 2 that "her reading is really improving now we're spending so much time on it!"

No love, that's what we've been doing for years!

Some children take more time than others. It’s always been about practice and she will get to learn that fot and fon do not make sense. When the word is in a sentence, it will not be sensible so she will recognise it’s wrong. Has she got books yet?

Reading lots of books together means children understand what are real words and what are not. Acquisition of spoken language helps, so lots of chatting and talking using adult words.

DD is an August birthday and was always one of the best at reading. A September born boy struggled. It’s not always age. It’s parental engagement and intelligence too.

Yes she gets books from school and we have phonics books here. We do read daily but I'm wondering if it's a case of it'll click rather than ramping up the pressure to read more.. I'm not concerned per se it's just my elder DD was nearly 5 when she started school and she seemed way more receptive to it all
Thanks

My DD found the school and phonics books utterly boring. We had a more luck with reading Early Reader books we got from the library, not a reading scheme.

Obviously she couldn't decode all words but enough to make it fun sharing the book. We stressed that school books are homework and we always treated homework as mandatory so she knew she had to do them. But the progress came with the other books.

I don't think you ought to 'ramp up the pressure', nor should you 'do nothing'.

Just a little bit of daily reading. Even if it is only five minutes (at age 4, that's plenty). Make it/keep it as a habit.
But don't make it into a huge, pressurised chore. That's the surest way to put her off reading altogether.

Most likely, it will 'click' sometime, and then she'll fly - because she will have retained her love of stories and won't have learned to despise reading.

If you want to do something regarding blending, in particular, you could do

• lots of 'oral blending' away from reading/letters. So 'have you got your h-a-t?' 'Look it's a c-ar!' (One good thing about oral blending is that you aren't restricted to the sounds she has learned at school - any sounds she can say, she can blend.)
• the 'opposite' of blending, i.e. segmenting. Again, you can do this purely orally - 'what sounds can you hear in 'jug'?' - but you can also get her to write out words (e.g. with magnetic letters) if she knows the letters for the sounds. For instance, can she write 'man'? This makes her think about the sounds she can hear in the word, and determine the letters she knows that make those sounds, and put them in the right order. Some children can do this before they can then 'read' the word back, because they cannot blend yet; but practising segmenting is great for awareness of the sounds in the words and how they correspond to letters. If the child cannot blend yet, then simply 'reading' practice might be tedious and frustrating for them, but segmenting practice might give them the experience of success they need to stay interested and keep learning whilst deepening their phonological awareness.

She's only a term and a half in, she's one of the younger ones, and she is starting to blend by the sounds of it. And you are doing a little bit every day. All sounds good to me.

When she can't quite blend a word, you can model how to blend for her. So you say the sounds back to her and see if she can hear the word. Stretch out the sounds as much as you can fffffoooooog. Words with all soft sounds may be easier fffffaaaaannnnn, but maybe those are the ones she's getting right already? If she can't hear yet, say it quicker till she can. Fffffaaaaannnnn. Ffaaannn. Fan. Putting a slight emphasis on the first sound can help too. (All tips gleaned from MN experts! I volunteer with yr 1 and still get a few that need blending help.)

Thanks so much for those tips both
We will carry on our nightly reading and homework reading and will work those ideas in too..

Brilliotic.. I love the idea of getting her to spell words. She loves her magnetic letters!! That's a great tip thank you
She knows all the sounds and can point out the letter if I say the sound so all the basic knowledge is there its just we've hit a bit of block with the blending

I know absolutely nothing about teaching phonics but surely there is an element of memory in all of this? My elder DD was reading well in YR with an August birthday. They appeared to learn by a mixture of phonics, breakthrough words and memory! Dd1 has a very good memory and still does at 25. Younger DD doesn’t remember things so easily. She took longer to learn to read. It was all a bit of a chore. Not all children are the same, are they?