THREAD: Day 3 of synthetic phonics at home and someone woke up on the wrong side of bed! Five-year-old didn’t want a bar of her letter and word sounding practice today. Very wriggly and disengaged. How on Earth do teachers control more than 20 of these critters at once?... (more)

We revised the A and E short vowel sounds today, saying words like apple, animal, any, act and elephant, elbow, egg. We said them and wrote them down and she pointed to the As and Es and sounded them with accuracy but it was obvious she wasn’t really into it today... (more)

With that in mind we moved on to decoding practice pretty quickly. After managing to get her sit still and stop doodling and actually look at the page, I wrote “mess” and pointed to the letters. She slowly sounded it and then looked at me and said “mess”. Big high five!... (More)

We had similar success with “miss” and “mass”. Initially planned to revise “sun” and “Sam”, which she struggled with previously, but thought better of it. I was a bit stressed by her lack of interest (at one stage she raced off to get her binoculars to help her read)...(more)

As an aside I’ve noticed a bit on side-chatter on a previous day’s thread about journalists and parents not being teachers (no argument there) and how letters don’t “make” single sounds and I’m doing my child a disservice ... (more)

I know that the letter U represents multiple sounds depending on context. The reason SSP resonated with me as it’s about breaking down something complex into something simple that a child can grasp, with the objective being to get that child reading independently quickly (more)

The way I see it, it’s like learning any new skill, keep it simple at the start and then slowly layer on new skills that reflect the growing complexity. At the moment, child thinks of U as in “up” but with growing confidence she’ll be able to understand that there are variations.