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.

I'm confused, are you the OP under a different name? Plenty of people have already said, the information is out there if you research synthetic phonics. Type synthetic phonics pure sounds into Google and you should find loads of videos.

To be honest, you're probably doing yourself a disservice by assuming you don't know it. Even though you didn't learn through phonics, I'm sure you will be familiar with 'ah' for apple etc (as opposed to 'ay', the letter name). The only thing that has really changed over the years is the emphasis on pure sounds. We don't put a hard 'uh' sound on the end of things any more (as opposed to the 'tuh', 'buh', 'fuh' which people use to be taught).

Google it

I'm just doing the sounds the letters make, haven't googled anything specific. Eg B is Bah, G is Gah

The nursey is doing this too so where I got the idea from, before I was just doing the letters the old fashioned way. They have suggested something online for me to watch so I will ask again about what that is. I've just had a casual approach to it so far

If your child is going to school then follow the one they use. Our children’s school use Read, Write Inc and due to lockdown I had to teach it to DD1 and it’s really straight forward for a parent to do it. Small disclaimer, I am a trained teacher but secondary so I was clueless about phonics.

lol hilarious to see some people advising against teaching phonics because parents will get it wrong lol. It’s easy, watch a YouTube video. I taught my kid to read at 2.5 and he’s thriving.
Watch a YouTube video, buy some flash cards, get the kids taught

Early years teacher here.
Alpha blocks is great.
Number blocks even better.
Reading and talking everyday - first class.

A couple of teacher friends recommended read write inc scheme to get our children familiar pre starting school. They were both doing this with thier similar aged boys at the same time as us. Amazon sells pack 1, packs and pack 3 and they are really easy to follow. Friends recommended a YouTube video so we could learn to make the individual sounds correctly, as they said this was most important. we were doing pen work and tracing before that.