Alphablocks

[OneCandidPlumNewt]

Hi, My twins are 4.5 years old and have been in nursery since 1.5years. Have deferred them (summer born) as they seemed not ready in some aspects and they will be joining reception in Sept 2025. I have been exposing them to alphablocks videos a month or so back . Prior to that , they were familiar with most of the alphabet letters. Now I am observing that for some of the letter when I point at the letter, instead of the letter name they tell me the letter sound whilst for others they mention the letter name . Myself am not familiar with phonics and did not learn to read using phonics. So, trying to understand if this is normal ? . Also the alphablock content seems huge and I was struggling to come up with the structure/sequence of videos that I can expose them to. Is there a sequence or order that i should follow so that it gradually builds on the earlier ones.

Alphablocks aims to teach through phonics, so letter sounds. It's good for children to know the alphabet, through the song, but it doesn't help them learn to read and write. Learning letter sounds is far more beneficial for them so definitely encourage learning sounds as this will mirror what they do in school.

It's been a while since I've used Alphablocks but you'll want episodes focusing on single sounds (eg, the sounds represented by individual letters of the alphabet - ah for the letter a and so on). You don't want to confuse them with episodes about digraphs (two letters representing one sound, like ch, sh, th, ai, ee, oa, ar etc).

As I said, it's been a while since I used Alphablocks, but I know Numberblocks is split into different series on iPlayer (with series 1 focusing on the most basic mathematical concepts for toddlers/pre-schoolers) so hopefully Alphablocks or organised the same?

I'm assuming they have an allocated school place if you deferred? Could you ask what phonics scheme the school use? The information might even be on their website. Each scheme follows a slightly different order, but all phonics schemes will introduce individual letter sounds first so that's your best place to start.

At this age they should be learning phonics not the letter names as this is how they will be taught to write. If they go to nursery they will be taught phonics.

Alphablocks is a great aid but it isn’t a system to learn phonics in it’self.

Sounds first, letter names later.

The school will have a synthetic phonics scheme they follow so please don't try and teach your kid phonics.

Cool. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. However just to clarify , I am not trying to teach phonics as I am not qualified. Just an observation, post the kids watching alphablocks and wanting to know the thoughts of others .

Start with Season 1, episode 1, since these are the individual sounds rather than digraphs etc. So "sssss" rather than "es" for the letter S.

Even if you don't formally teach them to read, you can watch along with them and start to gently point out how the Alphablocks join hands and make words. Games where they start to pay attention to the ending of words, like rhyming games, are also good, and also games where they start to tune in to how words are made - I spy, or "I need my hat, hat starts with...?" Look at the letters in their names etc.

If they already knew the names and now they are learning the sounds then I'd say it's normal. They are just getting things mixed up sometimes.

There is a big visual difference between E and e and not so much between S and s so it is confusing.

Learning the names and sounds is useful because when it comes to sounds with two vowels like ae or ue it makes the sound of the name of the first vowel.

You can teach them phonics as well as the letter names if you want :) at school they will learn both the sound and the name of the letter at the same time e.g this is the letter a (ay) it makes an ‘a’ sound so it doesn’t matter your children have learnt the names first.

Whatever scheme your school does, phonics is the same. The schemes will just teach the sounds in a different order, maybe have actions or rhymes for how to learn the sounds etc but the basic concept is identical!

I would say if you don’t know much about phonics look up how to pronounce each sound (which is called a phoneme) correctly. For example, many people think the sound for the letter ‘s’ is ‘suh’ which is incorrect. It’s ‘sssss’. Alphablocks will be brilliant for correct pronunciation or look on the little wandle website as they have videos for how to pronounce each sound correctly.

Excellent. Just let them enjoy the show then like you would any other TV show. Don't treat it any different.

@Fridgetapas they will learn both the sound and the name of the letter at the same time e.g this is the letter a (ay) it makes an ‘a’

Incorrect. They will be taught the grapheme-phoneme correspondence and be secure with that long before the letter names are introduced. Letter names come into play when more complex phonemes and spelling rules are taught and require distinguishing between the different ways to spell the same sound e.g. ee, ea, e-e, e, ie, y...et al, etc etc etc. In England, letter names are often held off until Summer term of Year 1 (age 6) and reinforced in Year 2.

I would only look on Little Wandle if that is the actual scheme at the school where the OPs children will attend. All synthetic phonic schemes have their nuances in teaching. Best to avoid confusion for all.

Unless you're home schooling, please leave phonics teaching to the school, and ask the teacher how you can support your child appropriately, at that time.

Before school, if you must dabble with phonics, support your child to hear the sounds in the environment instead. E.g. Go on a listening walk and talk about what you hear. Tune in. Read 'Going on a Bear Hunt's and talk about the sounds the grass/mud/forest/snowstorm makes. Listen for similar but different sounds, like bird noises. This is the most often forgotten and overlooked first step in teaching phonics.

Alternatively just let them enjoy being little kids.

Its not incorrect i’m a reception teacher and that’s how we do it. And before you keep arguing my school follows unlocking letters and sounds which is government approved, loads of schools follow it and they teach the names alongside the sounds.

And as a teacher I think it’s fine to teach them what you want at home - phonics isn’t rocket science.

Any order of main alphabet letter would be fine. They probaboy do satpin letters first.

Numberblocks is also good and 'peg plus cat'
I would probaboy get them tracing some letters too as school rushed through all phoics and writing them by oct of reception and my dc writing often did letters incorrectly

Consider it professional growth then, rather than arguing 😆

Its not incorrect i’m a reception teacher now that is a great line. Use it more often. Exactly as you've typed. 😆👀

I agree!

Some of the advice is really patronising - assuming OP is able to read and was as a child it's not that hard!

Alphablocks is great! My DS loved it, kept asking to watch it, and he more or less taught himself to read very early. Plus the songs are cute - we still sing them sometimes (13 years on lol)

If there a phonics system/ scheme you would recommend ?

Whichever one their school follow, which will be one of these (if in England):

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/choosing-a-phonics-teaching-programme/contact-details-for-the-validated-systematic-synthetic-phonics-ssp-programmes

They will be at a non English school (not in England) so want to teach them phonics/to read in English.
Of these, are there any that are considered better than others?

Primary teachers make out like synthetic phonics is only teachable in school but its not hard! While different schools use different schemes which do the sounds in marginally different order, it makes very little difference. There are lots of websites with guidance & resourcesm

Both my children were exposed to a big mix of different resources before starting school - twinkl, jolly phonics, collins big cat phonics, pearson phonics bug etc. Both knew all phase 2 sounds and a few phase 3 sounds and were blending well before starting school & slotted in fine with the class.

• teach sounds not names
• use lower case letters
• focus on listening first. Listen to jolly phonics sounds, play I spy.
• when moving on to books, allow automaticity to come in its own time (a good year after they start blending) - don't encourage a child to memorise whole words or reread books repeatedly in a bid to stop sounding out/achieve what appears to be fluency. True fluency comes when they simply blend very fast in their head and it just clicks.
• recognise phonics goes way beyond single letter sounds and be prepared to move onto digraphs/trigraphs and various alternative spellings.

Apparently not, although realistically - who knows. You'd be hard pressed to find someone that has experience of all of them to ask.

Most schemes are very similar. I'm a teacher, and yet I've only heard of about half of those schemes. New ones seem to pop up every week.

Each one will profess to be the best (or even only) way to teach phonics, but it's all a marketing ploy. Many of them require heavy financial investment to teach them with fidelity (which unfortunately schools have to these days, as mixing schemes is very much frowned upon by Ofsted). There's the cost of the training and all of the resources needed (the most expensive of which are the books). Most schemes design it so that only those who pay for the training have access to their resources. They won't simply be available somewhere online for parents to dip into. Even the 'free' ones like Twinkl require the subscription to the site in order to access the resources. Parents are therefore unable to 'teach' to one particular scheme at home. However, if you research synthetic phonics to understand the basics (some of which OohLarLar outlines above) and you can pretty much introduce phonics at home without following a scheme as such. As I said, schemes are just a marketing ploy. There's no one 'right' way to do it.

Each phonics scheme will work slightly differently. Some will introduce letter names from the off, others will say don't do this. Neither way is 'incorrect', it's just different ways of delivering it (although the designers of each individual scheme will say that different approaches are wrong!). For example, in the scheme we use, we don't tell children that letters 'make' sounds, they represent them. It's those subtle differences that are all just a marketing ploy to get schools and parents to believe that their way is the only way to teach phonics.

The ultimate aim is that children learn to read. How they get there isn't really important. As a Reception teacher, I value the importance of teaching synthetic phonics. It's frustrating how the government (and the people who design these schemes) seem to believe it's the only way to teach reading though. The insistence that schools use decodable books only was one of the worst changes to education in recent years, in my opinion. All those thousands of pounds wasted getting rid of all the Biff, Chip and Kipper books because, shock horror, they use common high frequency words like 'look', 'this' and 'for' in a stage 1 book, before children have been introduced to the code knowledge needed to decode that word. That works on the assumption that decoding is the only way children learn to read, which is absolute rubbish. No doubt the new government will change it all again once they have time to put their stamp on things, and we'll all be told that this approach is wrong and whole word reading is the way to go. I'm not saying it is by the way, a healthy mix of both would be my preferred approach like how it was when I first started teaching in the late 00s.

Why don't you sit down and do alphabet puzzles and play games with them rather than use a video to teach them? Something we have started doing with our 3yo is playing eye spy, but using sound. There are probably lots of things like that you can do

But I learnt to read in the early 90s so pre phonics so need to know what the sounds are I should be making. How did you learn that. Obviously I know sounds but not the official phonics sounds and want to teach the right thing