11 Plus Exams Forum

Help needed with this Y6 homework!!

'Sort the Sound' - DD needs to fill words into 3 categories: phoneme at the beginning, phoneme in the middle, phoneme at the end.

Words are:

key
castle
echo
cholera
quarter and lots more!!

Could someone remind me what a phoneme is. I thought, for example, that is was the 'little pocket of sound'. So by my logic the word key has 2 ie 'k' at the beginning and 'ee' at the end? Clearly the sheet only wants it to fit in one column. Could someone correct me?

It is taken from 'Searchlights for Spelling Y6' book.

Thanks in advance

Your understanding of 'phoneme' is correct. 'The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English.'

The exercise doesn't make any sense to me. Have you missed something in the instructions?

Thanks.

In an earlier section, they had to identify what was similar.

It all makes sense now!

Which phoneme were they supposed to say was at the beginning, middle and end? Strange year 6 homework .... More the sort of stuff you would do much earlier at primary. And was it the /k/ phoneme in the question above? Did the exercise help with the spelling .... Is it a good book? What was the point of it?

Yes Mystery it was the /k/

Book quite irritating - and yes I thought it was a strange Year 6 piece of work. Although it did show that DD had totally forgotten all the phoneme work she used to preach so clearly in Y2 !!

There are some good books which connect more advanced phonics and spelling patterns which could be suitable at ks2 and higher. But there are some poor ones too.

I find phonics exercises quite irritating as they do not take into account different dialects and pronunciation around the UK.

Apparently there are a few different sounds for 'oo'. In my Year 1 ds's homework, these different sounds take on huge importance, with different size letter 'o's being used to denote them.
Theres one that sounds like 'ooooo' (think Billy Connolly) and another that sounds like 'ew' (think the Queen).
Being a northerner I tend to pronounce everything (book, look, cook) a bit like Billy Connolly but according to the Phonics books, they are supposed to just be a nice crisp 'u' sound

I liked the "a says ar" exercise we received in year 1 containing words such as grass, bath, castle etc. I sent it to my family up north who passed it on to a teaching colleague to pin up in the staffroom for those who could not speak properly(!) My children quite often ask me this "if you both die and we go to live with relatives in the north, will we have to learn to speak strangely like them?"

They do have South and North versions in Letters and Sounds, but that's the only distinction, Northern Irish vowels would fox them completely!

Mr Yoyo was quite vocal when He saw moor in the 'or' sounds list ..he pronounces it "moo-er".

Similarly being a Gloucestershire girl I don't see the need for all these South East exercises to distinguish between are and our..it's obvious, one is 'ar' the other is ow-er.!