If your child has done well with learning their phonics and reading…

[RedRobyn24]

Please can I have some tips on how I can support my reception age DD with learning phonics?

We read a lot together and we’ve just been doing whatever the teacher has sent home, the first two weeks it was books with just pictures which we were told to read together at least 4 times. This week she was given a book with some words in it, like 3 words. But I was also given a sheet with sounds she should know now and I’m not sure she does know them well there’s about 12 letters.

I don’t really know where she should be up to so I’m a bit lost and keep worrying I’m not doing enough to help

I’m a reception teacher and not many children come into my school knowing the letter sounds. I’m in charge of phonics across school, too so although our school based nursery teacher phonics, they don’t teach letter sounds.

it’s much more important for your child to be able to recognise and match sounds, eg knocking at a door, dog barking etc.

Can she copy voice sounds eg ‘weeeeee’ ‘bzzzzzzzzzz’ ‘p, p, p, p’ etc.

Can she find sounds which sound the same? Play matching games with musical instruments?

Can she guess what you are going to say if you elongate the initial sound of a word?

Can she think of words that have the same first initial sound?

Can she orally blend words - you say c-a-t and she can copy c-a-t then say cat. (The copying part is REALLY important as it helps working memory to remember sounds when she blends words herself).

Can she say what the first sounds of a word is when she hears it?

The sounds are taught really quickly in reception and it’s so much better if you can practise daily at home. Could you build it into your routine each morning and night? I quite often ‘have a word’ with children when parents say they won’t practise. It’s usually because it takes them so much brain power and they’ve used it all at school. Pick out a few she 100% knows and add a couple of new ones.

Hi, please talk to your child's teacher before you buy things and get advice - it's great you want to help but will confuse her if you buy different to what she is used to in school. For context - the children in our eyfs have been learning a sound each day since they started so have been taught around 20 sounds now. Some of the children can remember 1 or 2, others nearly all of them. At the moment the best thing for parents to do is practice the sounds we send home and practice blending - so lots of games where you split words into sounds to help them hear them. For instance "it's time to go to .... B-e-d (say these as sounds) and see if they can blend into the word bed. Doing this with lots words will be the biggest help in them learning to read.

I’d focus more on the joy of reading. Phonics is a fantastic way to learn to read but it doesn’t create a love of reading. Normalise reading , role model reading. Follow her interests through books.

Stop reading daisy meadows because it will fry her little mind
😅

She can only have been there for what, 3 weeks? 4 max? I wouldn't be worrying just yet, but i would be practising at home and expecting to see a gradual improvement. You'll probably have a parents evening soon, so that will be a good opportunity to see her work and ask questions.

I agree with previous posters, re Teach Monster and Reading Eggs. My DC love those apps and I think they have really helped with their reading.

There are also maths activities on Reading Eggs, but we mainly use it for the Fast Phonics section. Lots of fun, and DC are always asking to do more activities.

I know it’s screen time, but if it’s educational and engaging, it’s worthwhile.

There are probably YouTube videos you can watch to help with whatever phonics they are learning.

When ReadWriteInc was introduced, our school held sessions teaching parents what the children were taught & how the kids would be trying to sound out words.

@RedRobyn24 It sounds like you're doing the right thing. Slow and steady helps consolidate the learning at home. I am a teacher and my son is currently in Y1. What worked for us was foam bath letters (lowercase). I would put 3 words or sounds on the wall (or side of the bath) and ask him to sound them out (in the early days I would model and he would repeat). 3 words are enough and it's a short burst that's easy for him to manage. It really helped with the tricky words as they just need to be learnt, so the more they see them then the easier they get memorised. Now we are in year 1, it steps up a gear because they introduce the alternative sounds ay/ai/a-e 😮 eek!

I taught mine to read before reception. First I nailed down her phonics, practice, practice and more practice. The Oxford read at home scheme is excellent, we also used the julia donaldson songbirds and then moved up the oxford levels. Ten minutes a day is more than enough, we would repeat books until she got it and then move onto the next.

Reading Eggs and Teach Your Monster To Read taught both my children how to read. I also bought a set of Biff, Chip and Kipper books and we worked our way through those, then a set of Ladybird read it yourself books.
When DD was at the stage of blending short words I made her a treasure hunt with short decodable sentences for the clues and she loved that.

For the multiple variations of the same sound, our school sent home flashcards (just printed on card and cut up) and we used these to play sound snap.

Also - alphablocks and (numberblocks) are good and if you look on iplayer I think YakkaDee has a phonics series too. From memory it's a bit like the old magic pencil videos of my generation 😆 There are some phonics based CBeebies games on little learners or whatever its called now.

A child learning to read will vary so much, because it comes down to orthographic mapping. This is how quickly your brain maps a word or sound into long-term memory, so it can be read and spelled automatically.

Some children only need to see a word once and it's mapped. Some need to see it up to 20 times.

The average is about 4.

So the answer is to keep showing them words and sounds and getting them to read them. And spell them. Decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling/writing) are two different skills, so you need to practice both.

It's an absolute slog if you're at the 20 times end of the scale, but there isn't an easy way around it.

Good luck!

I’m surprised so many start reception not knowing phonics. DS managed to learn all of his phase 2 sounds and was blending some cvc words by the end of nursery and he’s typically the one who will not sit still and focus so I really can’t imagine he’s ahead of the class in any way. But I’ve always just trusted nursery/school and I’ve never done anything at home except having a good supply of books for all the stages so if they really don’t want to read their school book I have an appropriate alternative.

Since your DD has jsut started in reception, I'd just take it easy. It's good to support at home but it's early days and I'd give her teachers more time to work their magic. In the meantime, let it be fun; try not to make it a chore or 'homework'.

When both DDs were that age, we read the books they brought home (even the ones with no words) and, in due course, practised spellings with them but mainly we just left everyone to work at their own pace and in no time at all they were reading.

Honestly, nothing above what the school set.

We've always read to her and when she started reception we encouraged her to read to us - things like we'd read the text, she'd read the words in speech bubbles or whatever. I think it's more exposure than anything else.

It's amazing how quickly they move in reception though. DD went from not being able to read at all to reading almost fluently by Easter.

She's Year 2 now and on the fluency books of her reading scheme (i.e. it's no longer about the sounds but the speed) and regularly sits and reads by herself. She was reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this morning.

We used the RWI flashcards others have mentioned. I also like the Five Minute Mum book, and videos on facebook etc, which have loads of ideas for games that will help kids learn without feeling like they are working hard if that makes sense, so letter games, sound blending etc. Mostly though we just had a constant supply of books, either ones we owned or from the library, and encouraged them to pick them up as much as possible, read to them, read with them, talked about the books etc. Fiction, non fiction, picture books, longer books, whatever sparked their interest.

DD is y1 now and reading pretty fluently, DS is y3 and loves asterix, tintin, and the dogman books, and happily picks up books to read when he feels like it. My living room looks like a children's library at the end of a busy day sometimes, but I don't mind if it means they are reading.

We have to drive to/from school so we'd often play games in the car thinking up words or looking for things with their sound of the day/sound of the week. She'd practice sounding words out and when they were learning to count syllables she'd sing and clap out basically every friend and family name she could think of!

An adapted version of this still works for GCSE prep!

We used to read everything - street signs, cereal boxes, recipes, clothes labels, tv schedules, shopping lists, party invitations, and of course story books at bedtime. We used to do school reading at breakfast time before the dc got tired. Embedding reading is about much more than what school sends home. When the dc started getting spelling lists, we’d put them in order of difficulty and have one or two “words of the day”. We’d spell them out, write them down, say them, sing them. We’d write them on a slate in the kitchen, and add a new word each day. So eg: on the third day there would be at least 3 words. I’m not saying this is perfect, but it worked for us. DS has just done his GCSEs and got 9 9 for Eng Lit and Lang, with a Distinction for spoken Englidh. He acheived well in English throughout school, with seemingly no effort, although he has always been a big reader.

Phonics doesn't suit all children, but unfortunately it's the system the schools use. My son struggled with it for a couple of years. Then I went back to basics with the Peter and Jane books and within 6 months he was reading fluently. Don't assume it's your child at fault here.

Mine loved jolly phonics and playing the little jingles that were on the app. She also responded well to reading eggs. Just find something she responds to eg an app or flashcards and expose her to them in short but frequent bursts. Also make sure she really understands the concept of blending and play blending games with her otherwise she might just not see the point in learning the sounds.

Remember as well that the ultimate goal is understanding what you're reading. If she's not that into learning to decode words then spend time talking about the story and learning what more complex words mean. The decoding will come with time

We used a variety of things - lots of reading, lots of reinforcing the sounds words start with, flashcards and games. We also used a wee app called Read with Phonics (by Way We Learn) which my daughter really liked although she quickly outgrew it and we never completed it. We always done that together, it's got a little alien character she loved.

I'm in Scotland and they don't teach children phonics or reading at nursery before school. I was confused before she started school as to what I should do as a parents as the messages were very mixed about phonics. But I just went with what was natural - making the sounds and learning the sounds of letters and letters together. Keep it consistent and simple.

Both of mine have read at ‘exceeding expectations’ though infants. I actually did get it wrong with my eldest- I taught her the letters of the alphabet before school and then she had to unlearn them. I don’t believe for one second that most children do know all the sounds. Our nursery was very clear that the school didn’t want them doing reading at pre/school.

The main thing is consistency. I didn’t do anything with my youngest before school other than oral blending games eg if I say c-a-t what’s the word?. She was a bit slower at picking up the phonics than my eldest in reception but then started to make very rapid progress. I’d also say youngest enjoys reading more. She’ll pick up a book for pleasure whereas my eldest who was very advanced at 5/6 has slowed as she doesn’t really enjoy it.

It is a priority to find out and follow the scheme your DD’s school is using. This will help you do the same as school rather than confuse your DD.

Have a look on the school website, usually curriculum tab. There should be loads of good information for parents.
If there isn't, look at the website of the same scheme they are using.

Don't use a range of approaches and programmes.

I didn’t do any of that. Dd was four! We did any homework sheets sent by the school and I read to her, we sang and discussed things we saw as we went through the day. Our priest put her onto his reading roster for Mass before she graduated from primary school so she did all right.

Just remember that brains develop in stages. If she gets to a certain point and you feel she isn’t improving beyond that, a gentle wait and see time is good. A few weeks later your dc will probably make an enough jump in skill, learn some more for a time and plateau again.

Honestly I have two children past this stage, one of them picked up phonics very easily, the other seemed to find it all a total mystery - we think he might be dyslexic like his dad. The advice I got was to go back a stage and concentrate on phonemic awareness. (Waiting to see if this helps!)

Does your DD understand the concept of rhyme, could she pick out which two words rhyme e.g. if told "cat, hat, pig" or if you're reading a rhyming book or song, could she guess at what word comes at the end of the rhyme if you leave a gap for her to fill it in?

And does she know what the first sound in a word is - e.g. if you ask her "Does cat start with ckkh, or mmm?" would she get the right answer most of the time? Can she do it without the two suggestions?

Being able to hear sounds in words and understand rhyme are phonemic awareness which is the step they need to grasp before they can do anything with phonics.

She is only little and the school won't be expecting them all to come in with phonics knowledge at all. They are probably in the stage of figuring out what the children already know.

The main thing to be aware of is to understand letter sounds vs letter names - mmmm rather than "em" for example. And to avoid what you possibly learnt at school yourself if you did Letterland which was to add an extra vowel to letter sounds so M is pronounced "muh" (ah, buh, cuh, duh) - this was changed as it is confusing. Some letters are tricky to pronounce without attaching a vowel at all so just do your best. You can repeat it like "t-t-t-t" - alphablocks is helpful for this (you can watch it yourself if you want to avoid screen time for DD).

Your child's school should have some info about the phonics programme they are following on their website or perhaps in a letter to parents or an info evening, which might not have happened yet at this point in the year. If you don't have this coming up, ask the teacher if they can recommend anything you can look at at home - for example if they tell you the name of the scheme they are following, you might be able to find parent info on the website of the phonics scheme.

I'd also ask the teacher what they want you to do with the letters on the page sent home - if the aim is for her to recognise them, then you could start pointing out when you see them (break them down into groups of 6 or 4 or 3 to focus on at a time if necessary) - the first six letter sounds usually used in British phonics schemes are SATPIN - it means they can make more words rather than going alphabetically, and it leaves more confusing letters for later, like C (which can make the sound /s/ as in circle, or the sound as in cat can be spelled with a k, like in kettle.)

Other things that we have done are games like "If rock started with P it would be pock. If it started with ssss it would be sock. If it started with nnn it would be [k]nock" - to get them thinking about how a word can break down into parts. (-ock is a terrible example - sorry! Too many rude potential words! But you can just nod and quickly pretend it's a nonsense word or talk about cockerels )

Or I-Spy with the letter sounds e.g. something beginning with sssss. As an adult be careful not to get distracted by the spelling of the word, e.g. cyclist begins with the sound ssss even though it's spelt with c, and things like sh and s are different sounds. This is about hearing the first sound of the word.

If they want to write something then I also encourage them to listen to the sound as I stretch out the word. "How do you spell Mummy?" "Let's listen to the first sound - Mmmmmm -ummy. Mmmmmmm. Mmmmm -ummy." Then when she says "mmm" herself, lots of praise yes, well done, and then you can point to a letter M to remind her how the sound M looks.