Comments: Can Erin, Carmen, Geoffrey or others offer some advice? I’m working with a little girl of only 4. She has a speech problem, which is being very well addressed by her mother and an excellent SLT. The school she will be joining has a policy of taking some children in September, and some in the following January depending on age. She will be joining in January. So, because of her speech problem, and her late start at school (compared with those who begin in September), her mum has asked me to help get her started with reading. My problem is this: her blending and segmenting at this point are very low. She can identify initial sounds, and when presented with 2 or 3 pictures, and the sounds for them segmented, she can pick the correct picture, and say the word for you. She can occasionally work out what you mean if you ask her to fetch an a p l, or a p a n. However, if you buddy read ‘Cat in the Hat’ with her, and read her ‘cat’ segmented, she just repeats the sounds back to you. Her blending ability seems to switch off when you show her text. Can you offer any thoughts on this?

Secondly, I’m working with her using the couple of suggestions in Reading Reflex for children who are not yet segmenting or blending at the basic level (basically, the blending game, and finding sounds around us), and I’m creating activities for her that are basically variations on this theme. I’ve been doing some research on the internet on phonological skills, and what I want to know is this: Much of the research starts out with segmenting sentences into words, and words into onset and rime before segmenting into sounds. Would you advise doing this, or avoiding doing it with this little girl? I can’t find any Phonographix advice on dealing with this situation, given that she is so young, other than perhaps to delay.

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