Or maybe it’s just me? Before I had children, I was fine with your generic alphabet book. But then I had children, and I started reading about the Montessori way of teaching literacy, by calling the letters by their primary phonetic sound rather than their name, which leads much more naturally to reading, which lead to me trying to figure out exactly how you were supposed to pronounce short ‘o’, and learning about how words that start with the letter ‘a’ are actually pronounced using 50 bajillion different phonemes, and learning about some other pronunciation discipline that I can’t even remember now because I had a second child in the interim, and there goes my brain.
But anyway, I had this book, that I really liked, the vowels were all great, (and it has neat indentations for tracing the letters with your fingers, almost as good as sandpaper letters), but every time I got to ‘X’ I got really irritated. ‘X’ does not say ‘zzz’ (xylophone), it says ‘kss’! (I finally figured out why people write ‘x’ for kiss!) Don’t get mad get even! Or better yet, just fix the darn thing. There pretty much aren’t any ‘x’ words that start with the proper phoneme, so you just have to go with ox or ax and emphasize the trailing phoneme rather than the leading one. Personally I think that’s better than the ‘correct’ phoneme being no where in the word. Sure ‘x’ says ‘zzz’ sometimes, but most of the time when you come across it in a CVC type word it is going to be saying ‘kss’. End of rant. FOR THE MOMENT!
