Alien english text

[grey12]

DD1 is going into Year2 and she's struggling a bit with reading 😕

She does this annoying thing where she sees a letter and comes up with a word. For example, "comes" she can read as car or mess depending on what letter she picks up first. 🤦🏻‍♀️ "spend" was just "spelled"

I want to encourage her to read, just purely read what's in front of her!! 🤬 (sorry this gets VERY frustrating!!!)

Anyways, she had this exercise before with "alien words" and she did those really well! But the exercise in question would be too easy for her right now. She would need like a full alien text.... don't know if that exists.... but if you have come across it, please let me know ☺️

Thanks

Children are given alien words to practise for the Y1 phonics check. To my knowledge, full ‘texts’ of alien words don’t really exist and would serve a limited purpose anyway as they work against a child reading and finding meaning in what they’ve read. Your child appears to be having difficulty blending left to right. She has got into the habit of making guesses based on initial or subsequent letters in the word. Did she pass the phonics check?
I would say flash cards containing all the phase 2 - 5 graphemes would be helpful for her. She needs to use phonics as her primary strategy when seeing words in texts. I would work on some of these as well as reading phonically decidable texts every day to make sure she is applying her blending on real texts.

@grey12 i feel your pain! My DD1 is going into year 4 and is struggling. Does similar to your DD, seeming to guess at words based on the first sound or jumbling the letters up to make a word. Drives me bonkers!

We tried Dancing Bears, DD1 hated it so we didn’t finish the first book. You can see samples on their website, it has been recommended on here and I think it would work but just wasn’t for my DD.

I would recommend having a look at sounds-write, they have a couple of free courses on udemy which show some really good techniques. The courses only cover the basic code but you can use the methods for the extended code as well. They also have an iPad app that covers the basic code we used it for DD2.

Also, have a look at phonicbooks they have really good books and workbooks that follow the same sort of methods as sounds-write. also lots of free advice and information. I am currently using some of their catch up readers with DD1, it’s slow progress but I’ve definitely seen an improvement over the holidays.

Thank you so much for the advice and suggestions 😊

We were worried about her because she is an August baby and she started talking late. I would have prefered to defer her a year but the system in the UK is messed up! 😵‍💫 why would you make them jump a year later on?!!!

She loves books and has really improved her reading massively during Year1 but struggles so much with unfamiliar words and gets distracted and 😫 so frustrating!!! She completely blocks sometimes

As a matter of interest, have you had her hearing checked? This would be a very common age to develop glue ear and even minor issues with hearing can impact learning through phonics.

I wonder if you just let her read each sentence as she is doing and then repeat what she has said to see if it makes sense.

So if she says "spelled" instead of "spend" you can read back "We went to spelled our pocket money" and get her to realise that can't be right and correct herself. Maybe then she could point to the word she got wrong and read that word again

Yes, it was a disaster!! The setup was incredibly scary, the paediatric doctor was awful at creating any kind of rapport with her and she basically did nothing at the test 🤷🏻‍♀️

He wrote that she was possibly autistic 🤦🏻‍♀️🤯🤬 wish I had had the time/presence of mind/clarity at the time to have written a complaint about him. But I didn't.....

We don't suspect any issues anyway. She seems to hear fine. Maybe issues with attention, personality?....

Uuuu good idea!!! 👍

We did that with my son, who did very similar to the other children mentioned (guessing, rather than decoding).

We are in a slightly different position as my son (going into yr 1) is reading books with phonics he hasn’t yet been taught so it’s hard sometimes. He can use phonics, but seems to have flourished using the “older” methods of just recognising words and using contextual clues.

When he gets a word wrong, I praise him loads if he’s tried to use phonics irrespective of how wrong the word is. If he’s just guessed I ask him to read it again, if he says the same word I pick out part of the word he’s got wrong and ask a question like “where’s the t?” (when there isn’t one) and be twigs that he’s rushed and looks again.

Good luck - it’s infuriating trying to not get snappy with them about this!

If my DD said spelled instead of spend then I point to the n and say if this word was spelled then this would be /l/ is this /l/ (saying the sound not the letter name ) if she says yes (not happened yet) then I would just say this is /n/ and get her to retry the word. If she says no, she will usually just tell me what it is if not I would ask her, if she doesn’t know then I tell her.

She usually recognises she’s made a mistake but is often blind to where she has made it.