by Katherine Wood
My daughter is now on the Year 1 content from Phonics Hero, playing games from level 8 onwards (parents can get a free trial). Here, children begin learning that there are different ways a phoneme (sound) can be spelled – known as ‘alternative spellings’ in phonics. For example, the ‘ee’ sound can be represented like this:
As she played Phonics Hero, I noticed that she needed more practice recognising and using all the different ways to spell ‘ee’. Too often, when reading, she would sound out an ‘ea’ (e.g. the word ‘bead’) as ‘eh’-‘ah’ and when spelling, always defaults to the spelling ‘ee’ every time she heard an ‘ee’ (e.g. ‘jolly’ would be spelled ‘jollee’).
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