Do your children forget spellings from one week to the next? Many teachers issue spelling lists each week only to find that a week or two down the road the children have already forgotten them. At Phonic Books we believe that teaching children the first 300 high-frequency words in a way that links up with […]
Read MoreThe Synthetic Phonics approach to reading is to encourage beginner readers to sound out graphemes in a word and blend them together into a word. What to do when they encounter common words with ‘tricky’ graphemes they have not yet been taught? Here is an explantion of how to teach ‘tricky words’ to beginner readers while staying faithful to blending strategies and […]
Read MoreThis week I learned from Susan Godsland www.dyslexics.org.uk that the new term for ‘tricky words’ in the new National Curriculum is ‘common exception’ words. This term that is rather confusing. Firstly, why exception? Exception from what? Secondly, as Susan pointed out – it is not the word that is tricky/complex/ irregular/exceptional. It is the part of the word – the […]
Read MoreThe term ‘tricky words’ is used for some common high-frequency words that a beginner reader may encounter. For example words like ‘the’ or ‘said’. These words have complex spellings (graphemes) that the child may not yet have learned. Because these words are so common, there is need in the early stages of reading to provide children […]
Read MoreFluent readers may find it difficult to understand why beginner readers find some words difficult to decode. Take the word ‘was’: It is a ‘tricky word’. What is so tricky about it?
Read MoreThese days we hear a lot about ‘tricky words’ or phonically ‘irregular’ words, ‘sight words’ and high-frequency words. Do all these terms mean the same thing?
Read MoreWouldn’t it be great if we could teach those high-frequency words strictly within the phonic progression of our programme?
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