Swissclover\" post_id=\"2121708\" time=\"1698637020\" user_id=\"58996:
thanks for the replies.
she likes to read, i hv tried to use phonics to help her, perhaps i wasn't helpful enough cos i try to make the sounds for her, she gets it wrong and l i lose patience.
Math - today understand, tomorrow forgets. drill until sometimes she cries saying it's too difficult.
I will start trying the math practice daily methods this holiday.
Agree with MKS that as long as she shows that she's making an effort, try not to force. Even if it seems incredibly slow, it's better to work on a very small no. of things at a time, repeat a couple of days, then move on. Holidays are good time to do this as there is less time pressure. Try to keep what you are drilling at the level where is can get it each time so she has some sense of achievement. If possible, end each session with something that she has mastered, and with some encouraging words. Ending every session with a sense of failure will make it even harder to move forward. I learnt this the hard way!
Teaching phonics for spelling is different from teaching phonics for reading. Your daughter can read, so she doesn't need to learn to sound out letters. What she needs is to recognise the different sounds in English, and map them to the ways they are spelled - it's learning phonics \"backwards\". Consonants are relatively easy as there aren't so many variants, though she will need to know that c, k and ck sometimes sound the same, and sometimes don't! And same for g and j, etc.
Vowels are tough for English as there are so many (long/short, front/back etc). Rhymes are good for this - use common words to teach patterns, e.g. for the long vowel a: bake/cake/fake/make, etc. Then move on to other ways to make that vowel sound, like fail/sail/wail; bay/day/say; etc. English has many spelling variants, which is why I suggest using phonics readers to try to capture as many patterns as you can. If she is visual (which is likely), you can write lists of similar words on a whiteboard, or write them on cards and paste them on walls, etc. Let her see them and read through them often, and once they are secure, move on to another set of words.
Another set of rules to introduce once you have got beyond the simple words is how to convert words from one form to another - bake/baking, bed/bedding, hug/hugged etc. But I think once you have done the basics with her, and she realises that there some method in the madness of English, she will pick them up on her own as she reads.
For the exceptions to the rules, she will just have to commit them to memory, but if she can manage the groups of similar words, there won't be as many to memorise. If she's visual, like my daughter and me, she may also be able to remember the \"shape\" of words, like whether it has ascenders or descenders, etc.
I did all this with my daughter when she around P3 too, and she caught on quite fast. She hasn't had issues with spelling since (no worse than any other student).