Why Some Kids Are Lost By The First Letter

The other day I sat in on a year one phonics lesson. Five year olds, sounding out letters, and I came away thinking about it for the rest of the day.

The teacher was wonderful. She had the children saying each sound with real enthusiasm, and she had given them hand signals, one action for vowels, another for consonants, so they could feel the difference between the two. Five year olds, happily telling me which was which. I was genuinely impressed.

They moved on to blends, the ck ending, with pictures held up and the children repeating each one. Then into their books they went, the teacher saying a word aloud, the children writing it down using the sound they had just learned.

Simple enough, you might think. And for some of them it was. There were children who just got it, who wrote the words with no help at all.

But here is what I noticed, watching it now as a specialist, through a very different lens than the one I taught with back then.

The entire written exercise rested on one thing. Every child hearing the sounds correctly, holding the instruction in their head, remembering which line they were on, and blocking out everything else in the room, all at the same time. No aeroplane going over. No one else talking. No moment where the teacher's attention was somewhere else.

I will be honest with you. I am a trained adult, and I was struggling to keep track of which word went where. So I tried to help the children who needed support. Some of them were looking around for help, asking the child next to them, leaning over to see someone else's page. You could see they wanted to get it right. You could also see some of them were confused and unsure, with no real way of working it out for themselves.

Here is the moment that stayed with me. The word was sock. The whole lesson was about that ck ending, the blend the teacher was working so hard to reinforce. But one little one got stuck right at the very start. Sss. Was that first sound a c or an s? Because both of them make that sound, and nobody had told him how to know which one to reach for.

Think about that. Everyone in the room, myself included, was focused on the end of the word. And this child had already come unstuck on the very first letter, long before he got anywhere near the ck. The sticking point was not where the lesson assumed it would be.

One little boy could not keep up. Maybe he lost the thread, maybe something took his attention, maybe he was not hearing the sound the way everyone assumed he was. In the end he drew a single line across his page. And he was gently told off for not doing it properly.

The boy who drew the line across his page was not being naughty, and he was not refusing to do his work properly. He was never given a way to take part that suited how his mind works, something solid enough to hold his focus the moment his attention was pulled elsewhere. Without that, it only takes one lost thread for confusion to tip into frustration, and for a five year old, frustration can look like a single line drawn across a page.

And I want to be clear, because this matters to me. I am not criticising that teacher for a second. I used to teach this exact lesson, the same way, with the same good intentions. I simply did not know then what I know now.

So what would I do differently?

I would add a visual layer. Alongside the sounds, I would teach the letter names too, in order, so a child has the whole picture, not just the audio. I would give the children something to see and hold, not only something to hear. Because for a child who thinks in pictures, a lesson made entirely of sound is a lesson happening in a language they have not been taught yet.

There is a place for auditory learning. I just think almost every child in that room would understand more, and enjoy it more, with something visual sitting alongside the sound.

If you have a child who seems to drift or give up during this kind of work, it may not be that they are not trying. It may be that they are being asked to learn in the one way that is hardest for them.

When you watch your child do their reading or spelling at home, what is the moment you see them start to give up?

In my years in classrooms, and with my own dyslexia and dyspraxia, I know what it is to understand something and not be able to show it. That is exactly why I do this work now, teaching the Davis method to people who think visually.