Sounding things out...
dinapug310
Hello.
I was wondering if anyone had a few suggestions for me, my daughter is 4 1/2 and started sounding out the first letter of words on her own a couple of months ago. She doesn't read the word, just says it out loud, like, "b,b,ball, b." When she comes up on C and K or S and C words, she'll insist upon something if I try to tell her it's actually the other. Like she said that caterpiller starts with a K. When I told her that it actually starts with a C and that C has different sounds, she told me no, it was a K word. Also, W, we have in the past done the sound of W, but now, she's breaking down the name of the letter, like Double-u and saying it makes a "d,d,d" sound. I'm not insisting on anything, I just say "okay" after she corrects me, but I'm wondering if there's a better way for me to explain it.
Any suggestions?
Thank you,
Dina
I was wondering if anyone had a few suggestions for me, my daughter is 4 1/2 and started sounding out the first letter of words on her own a couple of months ago. She doesn't read the word, just says it out loud, like, "b,b,ball, b." When she comes up on C and K or S and C words, she'll insist upon something if I try to tell her it's actually the other. Like she said that caterpiller starts with a K. When I told her that it actually starts with a C and that C has different sounds, she told me no, it was a K word. Also, W, we have in the past done the sound of W, but now, she's breaking down the name of the letter, like Double-u and saying it makes a "d,d,d" sound. I'm not insisting on anything, I just say "okay" after she corrects me, but I'm wondering if there's a better way for me to explain it.
Any suggestions?
Thank you,
Dina
Joyce Fetteroll
On Apr 27, 2012, at 1:10 PM, dinapug310 wrote:
Look at it as similar to her solving a crossword puzzle. You could point out the words she's gotten wrong but it would rob her of the satisfying opportunity to make those discoveries on her own.
People could look up the crossword answers at the back of the book and copy them into the squares. Why don't they do that?
If she asks, do answer her questions. If something she isn't seeing is getting in the way of a problem she's working on, you can point it out.
Maybe look for ways to support her putting the clues together rather than looking for ways to get the right answers into her.
Rather than looking for the "right" approach, use her feedback to your answers to help you figure out how to support her investigative process better.
Joyce
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> I just say "okay" after she corrects me, but I'm wondering if there's a better way for me to explain it.Look at it as a theory she's trying out. How long will that theory hold in a world full of data that says that the theory doesn't work?
Look at it as similar to her solving a crossword puzzle. You could point out the words she's gotten wrong but it would rob her of the satisfying opportunity to make those discoveries on her own.
People could look up the crossword answers at the back of the book and copy them into the squares. Why don't they do that?
If she asks, do answer her questions. If something she isn't seeing is getting in the way of a problem she's working on, you can point it out.
Maybe look for ways to support her putting the clues together rather than looking for ways to get the right answers into her.
> Like she said that caterpiller starts with a K. When I told her that itI would also have said it starts with a C. But if my daughter insisted I'd be more neutral and say "It does sound like it starts with K."
> actually starts with a C and that C has different sounds, she told
> me no, it was a K word.
Rather than looking for the "right" approach, use her feedback to your answers to help you figure out how to support her investigative process better.
Joyce
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Meredith
"dinapug310" <b38040@...> wrote:
One of the interesting things, watching Mo learn to read and write using the names of letters as her pronunciation guide, was that it was much easier to figure all of that out in the context of reading than writing. It didn't take her long to start reading, and it really didn't take her long to come up with a coherent system of her own for spelling... she just didn't start out trying to spell things "right" but went straight for "logical". So all /k/ sounds were k, and she worked out a system for when she would use c and when s - or z, and the same with g/j. I would occasionally drop little tidbits of information, and sometimes she'd ask me to spell something - and that's still the case, now that she's 10. She spells about as well as friends the same age who do daily spelling drills.
---Meredith
>I'm wondering if there's a better way for me to explain it.It's not that uncommon for kids to use letter names as a way of working out letter-sound correspondences, and even though it's somewhat confusing, well, English is a mess of a language anyway. What Do the letters g and j actually "say"? Not to mention c and s. For kids who like puzzles, that makes figuring out the language code a really big, really fun puzzle - so keep that in mind with your daughter. How might you approach helping her with some other puzzle? It's okay to offer little tidbits of information and see if she wants them, or not, or wants more - my daughter didn't want much information at all, though. She wanted to figure it out, and she did.
One of the interesting things, watching Mo learn to read and write using the names of letters as her pronunciation guide, was that it was much easier to figure all of that out in the context of reading than writing. It didn't take her long to start reading, and it really didn't take her long to come up with a coherent system of her own for spelling... she just didn't start out trying to spell things "right" but went straight for "logical". So all /k/ sounds were k, and she worked out a system for when she would use c and when s - or z, and the same with g/j. I would occasionally drop little tidbits of information, and sometimes she'd ask me to spell something - and that's still the case, now that she's 10. She spells about as well as friends the same age who do daily spelling drills.
---Meredith