5yr old son + phonics + not getting the silent letters = mummy wishing to beat herself with big sticks!!!!!!

[Psychomum5]

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I cannot do this anymore.........

trying to read with my 5yr old, yr1 son, who is not the slightest teensy bit interested in reading, words, letters even and hates school, makes for a very very frustreted mummy, who is trying SOOOOOOOO hard not to yell and scream and shout and tantrum, and would rather beat with sticks (me that is), or even poke my eyes with red-hot needles!!!!

I am trying to be a good mummy.....I reaaly really am, but please.....who needs phonices when c-o-m-e then makes for a word sounding like CUMMEY, he doesn;t get that t-h-e makes the, he thinks it makes Ta-he.......and then we get the word Giant.......which he says with a hard G, and then with an ant on the end......

phonics is PANTS, nothing makes sense, and I don;t want to shout and scream at him anymore, but how the hell else can I get him to 'get it', when the school insist upon them.....???????

ok, rant over, but help please.....or inject my son with the 'click' that he needs to suddenly understand.

Oh, and while your'e at it, please explain to him that telling the teacher that you are 'bored' is not funny.....it is embarrassing to your mummy!

And do remember that children often say they are bored by something when they mean that this is not exactly what they want to be doing at that precise moment. Don't leap to the conclusion that the teacher is boring, or you ds is not being challenged enough - it may just be him expressing that he would rather be playing football than doing literacy hour. Or is that just my ds??

seeker...I don;t for one minute think he is actually and truly bored by the teacher......I think as you say he is saying he is bored more so that he can go and do something he would much prefer doing(altho, I would be bored rigid by his age with those biff n chip books, what are the point of them???? give them fun books that are interesting and THEN they might read)

plus also, he does get into the habit of saying 'bored now' whenever he is not doing what he likes at home by copying eldest sis (13)!!!

The Biff and Chip books do eventaully get a bit more interesting once they get on to the "Magic Key" stories.

You could also stop trying to get him to rerad the stories - but instead get him to describe waht is going on in the pictures and then expanig into other areas )eg "walking in the park: where else do you like to go walking? what do you like to do in the park? etc) Our school said that that was just as important in terms of language development.

I think that generally children like Biff and Chip - I know adults hate them (particularly third time round!) but they are better than a lot of other reading schemes - and they are not unlike a lit of "real books" you buy for this age. They are funny - people end up face down in the mud or quirted with hose pipes - they are exciting - the Magic Key ones are quite good stories and they portray quite a good picture of real life - grumpy grown ups, sibling squabbles and so on. I don't really understand why people hate them so much. Have a go at Peter and Jane or the Red Hat Blue Hat ones and you'll be gasping for Biff and Chip!

I agree about the Biff and Chip books in terms of content. The thing dd hates is the illustrations, they have those kind of weird chinless faces. She's a proper little artist though so she's sensitive to those things. I haven't found a reading scheme that I think is better than ORT though and I've tried a few now.

abbylou -can you post some useful threads for mums who want to start teaching phonics to kids. what do you use in your school and are most schools the same?

wotb I will try and post some helpful stuff later but the kids are playing up at the moment. Just as a quick guide for people if you look here there is a guide to the first 100 words and then it breaks them down into the Phases that phonics are taught in. The ones on the left are the ones that can be sounded out and the Tricky Words are the irregular ones. Hope that helps for now.

Isn't that funny about the chins in ORT. My ds didn't like the mum because he said she had a big chin. I've always thought of him as about as artistic as a bar of soap - maybe I'm misjudging him - again!

seeker. They are rather uninspiring looking individuals aren't they?

have been thinking on my issues with the ORT books....

I have been doing them with my kiddies since DD1 started reading at school......and it was the teacher and her 'holier than tho' attitude with me and DD that got my back up originally. I had been reading with DD1 since very tiny....she had learnt her letters thro Letter Land (which was the teaching of choice with my nanny-charges), and I had done the 'Peter and Jane' books with her too....she started school being able to read.

teacher was NOT pleased, and made DD1 start on their first picture books so as to be at the level of the others!!!! to say I was furious would be an understatement, and the way DD1 was made to feel put her off school quite a lot in the first important year of just trying to get used to school.

it was the ORT reading system too, and of course, by the time we got to biff and chip we were both so upset and off put that I think that has been MY problem with then........and of course, the teacher was also the problem with DD1, NOT the scheme.

DD1 will soon be 14 (god don;t I feel old), and we have been doing them since.....with a change of school in-between with a change of teaching methods too. I DO like the change.....it IS easier for the most part, it just isn;t working for my DS2....for reasons connected to him I think, rather than the books/teacher/school....(and of course, my OWN 'ishoo's' play a part too....probably a big part as he is most definately a mummys boy!).

I think I will have to start him with the jolly phonics stuff and see if that is the way for him to click, otherwise I will have to wait him out.

DD3 was waited out, and she clicked in yr2.......but of course, I never had the other issues I have with DS2 as she was less infuriating and embarrassing!!!!

hey ho.......tis all a learing curve for US

pshyho
you are thinkign about his too much.

relax.

am trying cod, am trying

me thinks I stress too much

You definitely need a mixture of phonics and keywords/sight words. Ds1's Y1 teacher was a really good friend of ours, and she said that the phonics was MOST use for helping them with spellings, and that as adults we don't sit there sounding the words out, so the children will move towards using sight words. And the English language isn't really geared towards learning lots of different rules. Neither of my two eldest have learnt any of the phonics rules - dd sounds out as she is 4.6, in reception, and her books still have a lot of sound outable words. Ds1 who is 6.8 and in Y2 and reading Roald Dahl, Dick King-Smith reads almost entirely by sight words - it would be a tedious business if he didn't!

Dd has a word box or a 'wording tin' as she calls it, with key words in to learn. Her books also reflect which words they are looking at. So this week she had one which was 'Rosie saw a tyrannosaurus. Rosie saw a carythosaurus. Rosie saw a Stegosaurus. etc etc' Obviously carythosaurus was a word we had to help with, but she got the practice of using 'saw' in context.

its one of htose htigns youll look bakc on
doenst mean it aint pissing annying at the time

THis is a good poem that illustrates phonics and why it shouldn't be the only approach...

Recovering Sounds from Orthography
Brush up Your English

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble but not you,
On hiccough, through, lough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.

Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead--it's said like bed, not bead.
For goodness's sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat:
They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.

A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language? Man alive,
I'd mastered it when I was five.

Not forgetting George Bernard Shaw's GHOTI.

tortoiseshell I LOVE that poem

have never heard of it beofer, but am going to copy and paste and print and display.......it will really help DD2 as she is severely dyslexic and is getting so confused by all the differences in sounds etc. this will be fab!

cod.....yup, one day I will look back and realise it wasn;t worth as much bother as I have made it up to be.......just like baby colic and sleepless nights and terrible twos

I love that poem too!

just a teeny question ... on line 4 through appears twice, is one of them meant to be though? Not being pedantic, I also want to print it and wanted to get it right.

I'm guessing the second one is meant to be though, to rhyme with dough - I just did a cut and paste so it's a guess!

Did you work out the GHOTI one - it's fish....

GH as in rough
O as in Women
TI as in Station

oooh........I did wonder what you meant with GHOTI, but then thought maybe I was being a bit thick and didn;t want to show my ignorance.....glad to know that it actually meant something!

wow tho at that......am wondering how many other words you can spell using those sounds rule.....ooooh.....could be wonderful for writing in code!

Issy.....that is a wonderful and kind offer

yes please

how do we go about this.....I don;t have CAT set up ATM....altho if I talk ever so sweetly to DH tonight I may get to sort it.

thanks again

In defence of Jolly Phonics it isn't in any way American as it was devised in an English primary school by very experienced teachers. Letters and Sounds is Jolly Phonics without the actions which is what helps many children to remember the sounds.

ORT snapdragon books aren't compatible with Letters and Sounds way of teaching and this often causes the confusion Psychomum5 describes.

www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/local/clld/las/support.html if you download the support for parents document it explains how letters and sounds works and how to help your child.

I have replied

only problem (well, not a problem, more a 'confusion'.....I have received an auto reply, so guessing it is from not your home address email???? No worries, just telling as all, and then you know I have indeed replied!)