What time do kids get out of school in Germany?

German elementary kids traditionally got out of school around 12 or 1pm, then went home to have lunch with their families. As more mothers started working, after-school care started to be offered. More recently, some schools started moving from “half-day schools” or Freiwillige Ganztagschule (i.e., “optional all-day schools”, which are really just school plus after-school care) to Gebundene Ganztagschule (i.e., “required all-day schools”). At these all-day schools instead of kids ending school at 12:30pm and then going to optional after-school care until 3pm or 4:30pm, school just goes to 3:30 or 4:30pm for everyone. The details vary, but either there are more breaks from academic work during the day, or the mornings are spent similarly to in half-day schools and the afternoons are spent on non-academic subjects.

Between 2003 and 2009 Germany invested more than four billion(!) euros to create more all-day schools. (The main goal seems to have been to make it easier for mother’s to work. Additionally, German schoolchildren performed very poorly on some international comparisons, and teachers and politicians thought that they would do better if they were in school for more hours a day.) As a result of this large investment program, the proportion of all-day schools went from 16% in 2002 to 68% in 2016! (I don’t know what percentage of these schools are optional vs. required.)

Chickpea’s elementary is a Frewillige Ganztagschule. She currently gets out every day at 12:30pm, but starting next year (in third grade), she will stay until 1:15pm one day a week. (And actually, the year after she finishes elementary her school is changing to an all-day school.) Then we pay extra (but a tiny amount, something like 60 euros a month) for after-school care. We can pick her up from after-school care at 3pm or 4:45/5pm.

I was wondering how her schedule will change when she starts secondary school in fifth grade. The local Montessori secondary school is a required all-day school, as is the local international school, but I think most of our local Gymnasium are still half-day schools. The number of hours kids are in school seems to depend on the grade. But what’s typical?

The anxious style of American parenting

A friend shared this article with me and I found it very thought-provoking. I was surprised that lower income parents find parenting fun and rewarding significantly more often than middle and upper income parents do. The author attributes this differences to the “concerted cultivation” that wealthier parents are engaging in, all in an effort to ensure that their kids maintain their economic and class-based privilege — maintain the status quo.  The final paragraph is pretty impactful:

Just don’t mistake refining their human capital — molding them into ideal bourgeois citizens — for parenting. Because that work is not an expression of love, not really. That’s fear. And if your greatest fear is your child becoming poor, or losing the privilege and power you’ve accumulated, then you should pause, stop telling yourself that “you’re only doing what’s best for my family,” and think more about why and how you’ve come to accept that everyday reality for others.

After reading this article I started to wonder to what degree the “concerted cultivation” style of parenting the author describes in this article is present in Germany as well. I feel like in general there is much less “cultivation” here. There are few private schools, and even the ones that do exist are mainly attractive to parents who want less cultivation, rather than more (e.g., the waldorf school). There are no elite colleges: most kids just go to the university close to their hometown. There are few summer camps, and for little kids at least mostly they are things like forest camp or horseback riding camps, not programming or robotics camps meant to give your kid a leg up. The only common after school activities seem to be sports and music lessons, although I do know a few kids who take private language lessons.

Some of my favorite books from my childhood

A few years before I got pregnant I went through several boxes filled with some of my favorite children’s books, which had been sitting for many years in a closet at my parent’s house. The books were getting old and smelled musty and were hosting silverfish, so I decided to give them away. But I did write down the names of all the books before I donated them. We’ve read about 20% of them to Chickpea already (Update: Now up to 31% read!), and I’m going to record the rest here for the future when I’m looking for ideas for books to read to her.

Does having kids necessarily mean wasting food?

I have heard from a lot of friends that they find it extremely triggering to waste food. But all feeding experts strongly discourage parents from forcing kids to clear their plate. What to do?

1. Serve smaller portions: If you are serving the food, you can serve your kids small portions. Really. You might even consider tiny portions (like 1 tsp.), especially if the food is one they rarely eat or if you have a toddler. If they are serving themselves (and note that serving family style is recommended by feeding experts), encourage them to serve themselves small portions and take seconds if they are still hungry. This only works, of course, if they feel confident that their preferred foods will still be available. If they worry that someone else will take what they want, they won’t be willing to wait. Small portions are helpful with meals at home but also when packing a lunchbox. If I sent Chickpea an entire apple or an entire carrot it almost never gets eaten. But if I send 1/4 of an apple and 1/4 of a carrot, there’s a good chance both will be gone when I check her lunchbox after school.
2. Eat your kid’s leftovers: If you don’t mind sharing germs, go ahead and eat your kids leftovers, either immediately or another day. I routinely wait to take seconds until I see if Chickpea is actually going to finish her dish. If not, I eat hers instead of taking more directly from the serving dish. This is a win-win, because it slows me down as well. (I tend to eat way too fast!) Other times I save her food and eat it myself at another meal. DD doesn’t like the idea of eating leftovers off someone else’s plate, but it doesn’t bother me at all. It’s not like we aren’t all sharing each other’s germs anyways.
3. Repurpose their leftovers: Save whatever they don’t eat and use it in another meal. Some examples of how I do this are below. Even if there is only a small amount of something leftover, I like to save the “little bits” and then repurpose them in later meals.
4. Make an “eat me now” section/shelf in the fridge: This is especially useful if you have a hungry spouse or hungry teenagers in the house. Somehow section off an area of your fridge (this could be a shelf, a half of a shelf, or certain big tupperware, or whatever) and designate it as an ‘eat me now’ place. Any item of food that needs to be eaten up (produce, leftovers, etc.) gets added to that area. If someone is looking for a snack or something to make a meal with, that’s the first place to look.
5. Choose one day of the week to empty the fridge: Choose a day of the week (ideally before you do your biggest shopping run) and make one meal of the week “leftover lunch” or try a “smorgasbord snack tray” and try to use up little bits of whatever is still in your fridge.
6. Other ideas?

There are tons of ideas online about how to repurpose leftovers, but here are my top tips:

1. Fruit, for example pears: Chickpea is extremely picky about pears. She doesn’t like them hard as a rock and she doesn’t like them when they’re at all soft. And I’m not great at telling when a pear is ripe. So invariably I cut her a slice of pear and she doesn’t eat it. But I really like pear in müsli or yogurt, so I will often eat whatever she doesn’t eat. And Chickpea likes pear (even overripe pears) cut up into blueberry sauce on amaranth porridge, and she is not as picky about pear in salad as she is about eating it plain. So if I have some pear leftovers I might throw them into a beet and lentil salad, for example. (In fact, I throw all kinds of leftover fruit into salad. DD isn’t a huge fan, but Chickpea and I both really like the sweet juiciness it adds, especially if the salad has something more savory or salty like olives or nuts or feta in it. And when you dress the salad it covers up the fact that the fruit might have gotten slightly browned, which always scares Chickpea away.) Alternatively, I might freeze pieces of uneaten pear (especially if it’s extremely ripe) and use it in a smoothie. If I have a bunch of barely eaten apples or pears I might turn them into a quick apple/pear sauce. It’s even better if I happen to have cranberries or rhubarb to add to it. Yum.
2. Fruit, for example pomegranate: Sometimes I even give Chickpea her own leftovers on another day in another form. For example, imagine that on Wednesday I give Chickpea pomegranate in her lunchbox, and it comes home untouched. I might put it back in the fridge and two days later for afternoon snack on Friday I might give her rye Finn Crisps crackers topped with mashed avocado and pomegranates (which is always a favorite). Or maybe for Friday breakfast I will serve müsli with pomegranate and grated apples. Just because she didn’t want the pomegranate for snack that day doesn’t mean she won’t want it a day or two later, especially if it’s in some other incarnation. Of course, if she never likes pomegranate I wouldn’t do this. I probably wouldn’t put in her lunchbox to begin with, or only a tiny amount. But if it’s a food she often happily eats, and she just didn’t eat it (or eat all of it) one day, then I am likely to serve the leftovers to her again shortly thereafter. That is, if I don’t eat them myself first. I love pomegranate!
3. Raw veg / crudite, for example red bell peppers or carrots: I often put raw vegetables into Chickpea’s school snack, and sometimes they come back partially or wholly untouched. If we are having a soup or a salad or a stirfry for dinner that night I will often throw the leftover veggies into the dinner. Even if we are having something else like chili I might just throw leftover random veggies into it. I wouldn’t normally put something like carrots in chili, but when it’s such a small amount you don’t even really notice it, and it makes me feel better to not throw it away :). Alternatively I might add leftover raw veggies to some scrambled tofu I’m making for breakfast the next morning.
4. Cooked vegetables, for example roasted parsnip or cooked chard: I most often repurpose leftover cooked veggies into a bean tortilla. Chickpea will eat almost any vegetable when it’s in a tortilla with beans and cheddar and salsa. Sometimes I add leftover cooked vegetables to whatever I’m making for dinner. For example, maybe I’m making lasagne soup or enchiladas. I wouldn’t normally add eggplant or kale to those dishes, but if I have some left I just throw them in. No one will notice a little bit of whatever.
5. Beans: I often give Chickpea beans in her snack, and usually she eats most or all of them, but sometimes they come back untouched. And I can’t just throw them in the fridge and save them for another day, because after sitting in the lunchbox for hours they usually don’t last long. I might throw the leftovers in whatever salad or soup or stew or enchiladas I am making for dinner. But that doesn’t always work, especially if we are having something more East Asian for dinner. Sometimes I heat the leftover beans up in the microwave as an appetizer for Chickpea before dinner, or roast them in the oven with some spices. Chickpea loves “exploded” beans, and she will often happily eat them warm and exploded (popped?) even if she wasn’t interested in eating them cold at 10am at school. She also likes the way roasting makes beans crispy.

Why do so many people love the Dragonbox Big Numbers app?

I thought the original Dragonbox Numbers was an amazing app. We got it for Chickpea when she was around 4.5, and she played it happily on and off until our iPad broke when she was maybe 6? On the Dragonbox website it says it’s for kids age 4 through 8, but I think for Chickpea by age 6 she was starting to outgrow it.

Now we are all stuck at home quarantining with Covid, and I thought maybe it made sense to try the next Dragonbox app: Dragonbox Big Numbers. Chickpea has been playing it for a few days now and I am much less impressed with it than I was with the original Dragonbox Numbers game.

Best math games for Preschool through Third Grade

I recently came across the blog gamesforyoungminds.com, which includes recommendations for lots of math-related board games and books as well as various pencil-and-paper games that don’t require any purchases. The blog author Kent Haines recommends many of our favorite games. It’s an amazing resource. I wish I had written it myself! Below I’m going to briefly comment on his “must have” recommendations for various grades, then add a few comments about some of his other recommendations below that.

Can we prevent our kids from developing an anxiety disorder?

I few years ago I read this extremely thought-provoking article in The Atlantic: What happened to American childhood (childhood in an anxious age). If you haven’t read it yet, it’s definitely worth a read.

I read the article several years ago, but there are still a few parts that stood out for me, and that I still remember very clearly.

“Fear of dogs at age 5 or 10 is important not because fear of dogs impairs the quality of your life,” he said. “Fear of dogs is important because it makes you four times more likely to end up a 25-year-old, depressed, high-school-dropout single mother who is drug-dependent.”

When I originally read this article, Chickpea was still pretty nervous around dogs. I don’t know if I would say she was actively “afraid” of dogs, but she certainly didn’t like them and tried to keep her distance. Was that a sign of some kind of problem, or just a normal childhood fear that she would grown out of? (This seems to be a pretty normal developmental fear, especially because for little kids the dogs are truly quite bit in proportion to their own body size. As kids get bigger, it seems that dogs will naturally seem less scary!)

After I read this quote I started paying more attention to how I (and other parents) handled their kids fear of dogs. With Chickpea when we would pass a dog outside for a long time she would often make a wide berth around the dog. Or she would pause in a driveway and let the dog pass by before proceeding down the sidewalk. Fine. I’m not going to force her to get close to the dog. And she’s managing her own fear. But I have seen other parents preemptively pick their kid up so that they are away from the dog, yell at the dog owner to keep their dog away from the kid, or grab the kid’s hand and move their kid to the other side of their body to “protect” their kid. All of these convey to me “my kid can’t handle the fear, I have to protect them.”

“There is no greater risk factor for anxiety disorders than being born female,” Andrea Petersen writes in On Edge, her exploration of anxiety. “Women are about twice as likely as men to develop one, and women’s illnesses generally last longer, have more severe symptoms, and are more disabling.”

The article suggests that this discrepancy is because parents usually protect girls more than they do boys. A friend pointed out that boys may have lower rates of anxiety (because they are pushed more to “face their fears” and not be a scaredy-cat), but that this type of parenting will create other negative repercussions down the road, related to not recognizing or accepting their feelings. How can we not over-protect our kids while still allowing them to feel their feelings and face their fears in their own time?

I also remember that the author of the article implied that by not giving our kids chores we are coddling/overprotecting them:

When Braun Research surveyed more than 1,000 American adults, 82 percent said that as children they’d had regular chores—but only 28 percent said their own children did.

This quote isn’t directly related to anxiety, but given the context it’s in in the article, I would argue that it’s part of a message that parents are coddling their kids. Is that true? Is not giving our kid’s chores coddling them? I definitely feel like kid’s should be expected to help out around the house, but is it necessary that this help come in the form of specific chores? Maybe there’s something about being given sole responsibility for some task that’s protective, versus just helping out when requested?

Another part that I remember was a discussion of why some kids overcome behavioral inhibition, and others do not:

Another hint as to how parenting can affect childhood anxiety comes from the research on what’s known as behavioral inhibition—a shy, sensitive temperament that’s found in about 15 percent of 3-year-olds and that constitutes one of the strongest known risk factors for the development of anxiety disorders. Nathan Fox of the University of Maryland has spent the past few decades conducting longitudinal studies that explore how this temperament predicts experiences later in life. About 20 years ago, as Fox and his colleague Kenneth Rubin combed through the data from the first of these studies, trying to figure out what differentiated the kids who overcame their inhibition from the ones who didn’t, they came across an unexpected clue: Those who went to day care for their first two years were far more likely to be spared anxiety down the line than those who stayed home.

I tried to read the article above on the link between daycare and anxiety and what I found seems pretty weak. First of all, they are only looking at how daycare attendance correlates with behavior inhibition as the kids age. Although that temperament is highly correlated with anxiety in adulthood, it’s just just a predictor. Also, the kids weren’t randomly assigned to daycare, so it could just be that anxious parents keep their kids at home and it’s the parent’s anxiety levels that predicts the kid’s anxiety, not a specific effect of daycare per se. Maybe there are better studies out there but I couldn’t find them on a quick search.

Finally, I remember the anecdote about what happened after an earthquake in California.

[M]y mind keeps wandering to two children’s drawings reproduced in the pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce’s book The Orchid and the Dandelion: Why Some Children Struggle and How All Can Thrive. Both depict California’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed dozens of people—and also, as chance would have it, occurred midway through a study Boyce was conducting of whether stress increased local children’s susceptibility to illness. Naturally, he and his team expanded the study to incorporate their reactions to the disaster, and they asked each child to “draw the earthquake.” The kids’ responses varied dramatically. Some produced cheerful pictures—“homes with minor damage, happy families, and smiling yellow suns”—while others generated scenes of destruction and injury, fear and sadness. To Boyce’s fascination, children who drew darker scenes tended to stay healthy in the weeks that followed, while those who drew sunny pictures were more likely to come down with infections and illnesses.

Boyce now believes it was protective for children to create “honest, even brutal depictions of a no-doubt-about-it disaster.” We talk about things that scare us, he ventures, “because it makes them gradually less scary; about sadness, because it makes the sadness diminish a little each time we do.”

I guess the hypothesis was that the kids who drew the scary/dark pictures had worked through the bad feelings and let them out, whereas the kids who drew sunny pictures were still holding all those feelings inside. And that somehow the additional stress from the worry and fear leads to increase rates of illness? I wonder if that result has been replicated?

The article ends as follow:

I am drawn to this story in part …. because its moral is at odds with the way adults so often try to shield children from difficult topics. In fact, it sometimes seems that the more overwhelming the world gets, the more adults try to blindfold children.

In the end, one lesson we might derive from everything scientists and clinicians have learned about anxiety is this: If we want to prepare our kids for difficult times, we should let them fail at things now, and allow them to encounter obstacles and to talk candidly about worrisome topics. To be very clear, this is not a cure-all for mental illness. What we need to recognize, though, is that our current approach to childhood doesn’t reduce basic human vulnerabilities. It exacerbates them.

This article was the first time I had heard about the SPACE program, although it’s come up many times since then. I was intrigued by it, but after reading about it I also had a whole host of questions.

A highly promising new treatment out of Yale University’s Child Study Center called SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions) takes a different approach. SPACE treats kids without directly treating kids, and by instead treating their parents. It is as effective as CBT, according to a widely noted study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry earlier this year, and reaches even those kids who refuse help.

I was at first surprised that it is so talked about given that it is “as effective as CBT.” That doesn’t sound that effective! But it seems like just getting an anxious kid to agree to go to therapy is often difficult, so a therapy that doesn’t require the kid to do anything is actually pretty useful. Here’s more about the SPACE program, which teachers parents how to change their behavior when responding to kids with anxiety.

One of the basic premises behind the SPACE program is that a parent should reduce accommodations:

“There really isn’t evidence to demonstrate that parents cause children’s anxiety disorders in the vast majority of cases,” Lebowitz said. But—and this is a big but—there is research establishing a correlation between children’s anxiety and parents’ behavior. SPACE, he continued, is predicated on the simple idea that you can combat a kid’s anxiety disorder by reducing parental accommodation—basically, those things a parent does to alleviate a child’s anxious feelings. If a child is afraid of dogs, an accommodation might be walking her across the street so as to avoid one. If a child is scared of the dark, it might be letting him sleep in your bed.

But for those of us trying to take a “respectful parenting” approach, how do you know whether an “accommodation” is just being respectful of your child’s preferences and wishes, or something that is enabling their avoidance of an anxiety trigger? I know tons of parents who sleep with their kids, or lay with them while they fall asleep. In many cultures, it is considered highly abnormal to sleep alone. (See the Anna Hibiscus excerpt at the bottom of this page, for example.) Maybe the difference has to be about whether you are trying to meet your child’s needs vs. afraid of your kid’s disappointment/fear/anxiety. In other words, if you are trying to actively avoid your own discomfort (i.e., negative feelings of your own when faced with your child’s fear), then it is perhaps an accommodation?

And maybe it also has to do with whether you can slowly remove the accommodation over time? Here, for example, is an article a friend sent me about how her parenting coach addressed anxiety that was affecting her daughter’s ability to sleep alone.

Say your kid doesn’t want to go to after-school care. If it’s just because they enjoy being home with you, and they don’t particularly get much from the after-school program, then you might say fine, stay home after school from now on. We’ll make it work. But if they actually do enjoy hanging out with their friends and doing things in the after-school program, and they are avoiding after-school care simply because they are anxious about something (maybe the older kids in the mix), then probably you should respond differently. Whether or not they have a diagnosis of anxiety, they are avoiding something that could be very positive because there’s a part of them that’s anxious.

And maybe a red flag to look for is when the accommodation seriously impacts your own life? In the article they gave examples where parents moved house or were late to work every single day. Those are clearly accommodations that are having negative consequences for the adults.

For co-sleeping, I feel like if your kid prefers it and it works for you, great. But if you choose to miss an important event because your kid is afraid to sleep without your presence–the that’s accommodating. It seems like if you are always going far out of your way to prevent your kid from being disappointed, afraid, upset…that’s a red flag.

But this still leaves the question, how do you respect your child and respond to their fears without just accommodating (i.e., the child “wins”) or by not being responsive (i.e., the parent “wins”). How do you find a middle ground? The SPACE program talks about being more “supportive.” I tried to find a definition of the support part (the s in SPACE) and so far found “a supportive manner that conveys acceptance of the child’s genuine distress along with confidence in the child’s ability to cope with anxiety.” So it seems to be about empathy with negative emotions—not ignoring or dismissing their feelings. And then after you empathize and don’t accommodate further you support by problem-solving ideas to help your kid manage the hard situations without simply avoiding them.

But still I feel a bit unsure. If my kid doesn’t want to try out a new gymnastics course, is that her avoiding a situation because she’s afraid, or just a normal kid preference that should be respected? In my case Chickpea isn’t a particularly anxious kids, so mostly I’m not worried about the consequences of any “accommodations.” But for kids who do tend to be anxious, how do you tell when something is just a normal preference that should be respected vs. avoidance due to anxiety? Or maybe it is avoidance, but the anxiety is due to a normal developmental fear that they will naturally grow out of? I guess you have to look for patterns of avoidance and what happens those times when you can’t accommodate? And then you can tell the difference between a request/preference/desire and avoidance of a situation that creates anxiety? Still, it seems very hard to know what a kid will “grow out of” naturally over time vs something that needs more professional support. I guess I generally feel like if the parent generally has a “I trust my child to handle hard things (with my support)” attitude, then they will stop accommodating when it’s clearly doing a disservice to their kid. Whereas if they generally have a “must protect my poor fragile child” attitude, then it doesn’t bode well.

Word / language games for new readers

Chickpea loved playing Balderdash with my family this summer, but the writing up of a made-up definition is still a bit too hard for her. She can play on a team with an adult, but I’m looking for other word-related games (i.e., games that involve some reading and/or spelling) that might scratch a similar itch, but that she could play independently.

Word/language games we’ve tried so far:

• Boggle: We’ve tried this a few times with a big boggle (5×5 grid). Chickpea looks for 2 to 5 letter words, and the adults look for 5+ words. It works reasonably well. But it doesn’t have the same kind of creative spirit as Balderdash.
• In a Pickle: This game has been a reasonable hit with Chickpea. It requires a certain out of the box thinking that’s vaguely reminiscent of Balderdash. Chickpea can read many of the cards, but many words she still needs help with. It mostly doesn’t affect the game play though. She can just ask us to help her read her cards, and we help her read the cards that we play. Personally I find the gameplay a bit random, but it’s okay as an occasional change of pace. And I do enjoy observing Chickpea’s creativity at work. For example, I tried to argue that a voice is bigger than smoke because you could call through smoke and be heard, but Chickpea countered that if it were really smoky you would probably lose your voice. Another clever play: “Trouble is bigger than a spring because trouble is something and a spring can dry up in summer and then it’s nothing.”
• Fitzit: We just started playing this game. It has a bit less of the creative spirit of Balderdash and In a Pickle, but a slightly more interesting gameplay than In a Pickle. The cards are a mix of easy to read (like “flat”, “beeps”, “has legs” and “can fly”), medium difficulty (“starts with an S”, “emits light”, “used to build something”), and harder to read (like “requires tickets or reservations”, “usually considered unhealthy”, “suitable for a garbage disposal”). I usually try to give Chickpea a pile of cards that are on the easier-to-read side, and she is learning the card’s more commonly used function words (like usually, requires, likely, often,…). But in this game it doesn’t seem so important to keep your cards hidden from the other players, so we just help her read her cards if she gets stuck.  The game itself is quite a bit harder than In a Pickle though. As the cards build up in a row you have to think of an object that satisfies many different properties, and that gets challenging fast. Chickpea is still struggling a bit with the logic of the game, but I think she will enjoy it with a bit more practice.

Other games that we haven’t yet tried, but that look intriguing:

• Apples to Apples (Kid edition): I like the adult version of this game a lot, but haven’t tried the kids version yet. With this game secrecy of the cards is paramount, and I think my daughter won’t yet be able to read many of the cards, so we have put it aside for now. There’s also a “freestyle” version I’ve heard that like Balderdash let’s you write your own cards.
• Articulate / Alias for kids: We don’t own either of these games but Articulate offers a “virtual” card deck available online. The words are not all that easy to read, but I think it could work okay because the opposing team could help her to decipher a word she can’t read herself? It seems that Alias (either the Family or Junior versions) are similar.
• Scattergories: We haven’t tried this one yet. I worry that some of the categories might be not very accessible to kids, but maybe it would work if we came up with our own categories?
• Bananagrams: I have never tried this game, but one online review recommended DOUBLE Bananagrams, since it gives you twice the number of letter tiles.

Why we love the game Qwixx

Our extended Covid lockdown started in mid-March 2020. At first we played a ton of geography games, but by the end of April I was growing tired of geography and I ordered a few new games, one of which was Qwixx. Of all the games I ordered at that time, Qwixx was by far the biggest hit. We have been playing it almost nonstop for the last 18 months. It’s definitely Chickpea’s go-to game at the moment. And despite playing it every day for months now, I am also not tired of it! I figured it was time I write up a review.

In what order should you teach vowel teams / vowel digraphs?

Chickpea has gotten pretty good at reading CVC short vowel words, as well as CVCE words, and she’s gotten good at most consonant digraph/blends like ST, CH, PL, etc. But vowel digraphs (or what people sometimes call vowel teams) are still confusing to her. I was trying to figure out in what order it makes sense to introduce them, and I was curious about the absolute and relative frequency of various pairs, as well as how consistent their pronunciation is. I looked around for some statistics and found this website , which reports on an analysis of the top 3000 most frequent words in English. It lists how reliable (or consistent) the pronunciation of each digraph is. I’m sorting them here from most to least consistent. I’m also comparing to the sounds listed for the basic phonograms on the Logic of English page, which as I understand it are supposed to be sorted from most to least frequent.

Extremely consistent:

• oy -> /oy/ (boy) 100%
• oi -> /oy/ (join) 100%
• aw -> /aw/ (saw) 100%
• ee -> /E/ (feet) 96%. One common exception is been.
• ay -> /A/ (play) 96%. One common exception is says.
• oa -> /O/ (coat) 95%. One common exception is broad.

Pretty consistent, with one dominant pronunciation:

• ew ->  /OO/ (flew) 88%; /U/ (few) 19%. LOE teaches both sounds. Other /U/ words include pew, skew, phew, view, curphew, and nephew. I think the percentages add up to more than 100% because some words (like “new” and “dew”) can have either pronunciation, depending on a dialect’s degree of yod-dropping. One common exception where ew says neither /OO/ or /U/ is sew.
• au -> /aw/ (cause) 79%, but I feel like in common words kids are likely to encounter it’s much more consistent than this percent implies. The LOE program only teaches the /aw/ sound for this digraph. Two common exceptions are laugh and because. But note that LOE teaches “augh” as a separate phonogram. I’m not sure why, given that it almost always makes the sound /aw/, with the exception of laugh and its derivative words.
• ey -> /E/ (monkey) 77%, but in short words it usually makes (/A/, they). And, indeed, the LOE program teaches both sounds, and actually lists the (/A/, they) sound as more frequent than /E/. One common exception where ey makes neither a long A nor a long E sound is the word eye. Also geyser.
  • Are there patterns regarding when ey makes a long /A/ vs. a long /E/ when it appears at the end of a word?
    • ey = /A/ in short (3- to 4-letter) 1-syllable words: hey, they, grey, prey, whey (exception: key). Note that if a new reader were to pronounce these with a long /E/ sound, they would often be confusing them with other words that they should most likely know (he, the, we…)
    • ey = /A/ in 2-syllable words with stress on the 2nd syllable: obey, convey, survey (the verb)
    • ey = /E/ in 2-syllable words with stress on the 1st syllable: money, honey, kidney, alley, journey, valley, barley, parsley, monkey, donkey, turkey (exception: survey, the noun)
• ai -> /A/ (rain) 75%, occasionally it makes a schwa sound (like in captain) but this usually only happens in a multiple-syllable word in an unstressed syllable. The LOE program only teaches the long /A/ sound for this digraph. Two common exceptions are said and again. That said, even if a new reader pronounces these words with a long A sound, most likely the context will still make it clear what the word is.

Less consistent, with at least two common pronunciations. (I’m not sure why the percentages don’t add up to 100%?)

• ow -> /O/ (snow) 68%; /ow/ (how) 32%. The LOE teaches these two sounds in the opposite order, oddly. Maybe because in short words kids encounter the /ow/ sound is more common? Let’s see, if we ignore plurals and -ed verbs, then looking at these word lists:
  • For 3-letter words ending in ow the situation is pretty even. We have 6 /ow/ words (how, now, cow, wow, vow, bow [bending]) and 5 /O/ words (low, row, bow [ribbon], tow, sow).
  • For 3-letter words not ending in ow we have one /ow/ word (owl) and two /O/ words (own and owe).
  • For 4- to 5-letter words ending in an ow we have only 4 /ow/ words (brow, plow, meow, and allow) vs. 15 /O/ words, (know, show, grow, flow, slow, snow, blow, glow, crow, stow, throw, arrow, widow, elbow, and below).
  • For four- and five-letter words not ending in an ow we have the reverse, with more /ow/ than /O/ words. We have 20 /ow/ words (down, town, gown, howl, fowl, power, brown, crowd, crown, tower, towel, clown, drown, frown, rowdy, vowel, dowry, growl, prowl, scowl) vs. only 3 /O/ words, two of which are past-tense verbs (bowl, flown, thrown).
• ea -> /E/ (seat) 64%; /e/ (head) 17%.
  • The LOE program also teaches a third sound (/A/, steak) for this digraph. It’s pretty rare though. On a quick search (ignoring “ear” words) I only found great, steak, and break, all of which seemed to have somehow escaped the great vowel shift. I’d consider that an exception rather than a rule.
  • Note that LOE teaches “ear” as a separate phonogram, with the sound /er/. But looking at some 3- to 5-word examples I see 15 short /ear/ words (ear, year, near, hear, fear, rear, gear, sear, tear–noun, clear, beard, shear, spear, smear, teary) but only 7 /er/ words (earl, earn, early, learn, earth, pearl, yearn), along with 5 short /air/ words (wear, bear, tear–verb, pear, swear), and 1 /ar/ word (heart).
  • Are there patterns regarding when ea makes a short /e/ rather than a long /E/?
    • “ead” words seem to always be /e/ words: head, dead, read, bread, spread, thread, instead, already, meadow
    • other /e/ words it’s not as clear what the pattern is: deaf, sweat, threat, meant, dreamt, heavy, weather, feather, measure, pleasure, weapon, ocean, breakfast
• ia -> /E/a/ (piano) 54%; /u/ (Asia) 46%
• ui -> /i/ (build) 53%; /U/ (fruit) 24%. The LOE program only teaches the /OO/, fruit sound. I looked at the words containing ui on this page and on this page, and ignoring qu words the only relatively common short words I see are suit, ruin, fruit, juice, bruise, and cruise. Other than build/built the /i/ sound seems to occur almost entirely in qu words, in which case it’s not really a ui digram, it’s just a qu+i, so I wonder if these percentages are wrong. Other exceptional ui words: suite, guide, biscuit. Apparently gui, like qui, is considered a special case.
• ei -> /A/ (rein) 50%; /E/ (either) 25%. The LOE program actually teaches a third sound /I/, as in feisty.  Not sure why it’s not shown here. Note that LOE teaches “cei” as a separate phonogram making the sound (/s/E/, receive), and “eigh” as a separate phonogram making the sound (/A/, eight) and /I/, height). Not sure why these graphemes get special treatment, given that their sounds are just a subset of the sounds of “ei”?
• oo ->  /OO/ (boot) 50%; /oo/ (book) 40%. The LOE program teaches a third sound, (/O/,floor). But maybe that only occurs with an r?  Two common exceptions are blood and flood.
• ie -> /E/ (field) 49%; /I/ (tied) 27%. The LOE program actually only teaches the (/E/,field) sound. Maybe the other sound only occurs with suffixes?
• oe ->  /O/ (toe) 44%; /OO/ (shoe) 33%; /u/ (does) 22% [only 9 words in sample] The LOE program only teaches /O/,toe and /OO/,shoe.
• ou ->  /ow/ (out) 43%; /u/ (touch) 18%; /U/ (your) 7%. LOE actually teaches 5 sounds for this digraph! /ow/, house; /O/, soul; /U/, group; /u/, country; /oo/, could; It also teaches ough as a separate phonogram. I look at some patterns for “ou” below.

But that’s just looking at consistency. What about frequency? The best resource I could find is this article by Edward Fry “Phonics: A Large Phoneme-Grapheme Frequency Count Revised.” They analyzed a corpus of 17k+ words in which each word was only counted once, even if it occurred much more frequently. Each word was divided into phonemes and the corresponding grapheme (spelling). I extracted the data for vowel digraphs and diphthongs (like aw, oy, ew, ey…). Each digraph can be classified based on its frequency in the corpus (in this case frequency is defined as the number of distinct words it occurred in). Here’s a list of the most frequent vowel/diphthong digraphs:

• ou 622: 366 (/u/, double), 227 (/ow/, out), 29 (/OO/, you)
• ea 398: 245 (/E/, eat), 139 (/e/, head), 14 (/A/, break)
• oo 287: 173 (/OO/, moon), 114 (/oo/, look)
• ee 249: (/EE/, bee) — an exception is been, but it’s not listed in the table?
• ow 236: 124 (/O/, own), 114 (/ow/, owl)
• ai 223: 208 (/A/, rain): 15 (/i/, captain)
• au 146: (/aw/, auto)
• ay 131: (/A/, say)
• oa 126: (/O/, goat)
• oi 92: (/oy/, oil)
• aw 75: (/aw/, awful)
• ew 60: (/OO/ or /U/ as in new/flew or few)
• ey 54: 40 (/E/, money), 14 (/A/, they).
• oy 48: (/oy/, toy)

Putting these two together, we can classify the digraphs based on how frequently each occurs and how consistent its pronunciation is. Here’s a rough breakdown, in the order I think it would make sense to teach them:

1. High frequency (125-250 words), consistent (95-100%), long vowel sounds: ee, ai, ay, oa (I’m including ai in this list although technically it’s only 75% consistent because I think in one-syllable kid-friendly words it is much more consistent.)
2. High frequency (125-250 words), fairly consistent (75-95%): au (Note that although au is only listed above as 79% consistent, in words kids encounter it seems to be much more consistent than that.)
3. High frequency (125-250 words), somewhat consistent (67-75%): ow.
4. Medium frequency (45-100 words), consistent (95-100%): oi, aw, oy
5. Highest frequency (275-650 words), inconsistent (<65%): ou, ea, oo
6. Medium frequency (45-150 words), fairly consistent (77-88%): ew, ey (Note that although ey is listed as only 77% consistent above, it’s more regular than it seems because in one-syllable words it usually says /A/ and in multi-syllable words it usually says /E/)
7. Very infrequent (<45 words), inconsistent (<65%): ia, ui, ei, ie, oe

This page suggests teaching vowel teams that correspond to long vowel sounds first (ay, ai, oa, ee, etc.)

This page suggests teaching vowel teams in the following order. Note that they don’t usually recommend teaching different phonemes for the same grapheme back-to-back. Instead they break them up:

1. ai (rain), ay (say), ee (bee), ea (eat), oa (goat), oe (toe), ow (snow), oo (food and book), ow (plow), ey (valley), ou (ouch)
2. oi (boil), oy (boy), ie (piece), ie (pie), ea (bread), ea (steak), ou (soup), au (August), aw (saw)
3. ew (few), ew (grew), ei (ceiling), ei (vein), eigh (eight), ue (rescue), ue (true), eu (Europe), eu (sleuth), ui (juice)
4. ou /u/ (touch)

Finally, are there patterns regarding when ou makes which sound? The primary sound of “ou” is /ow/:

• ou = /ow/: loud, pout, about, found, round, sound, house, cloud, south, proud, couch, flour, doubt, count, mouth, bound, ounce

If we ignore “ough” words, which LOE considers a separate phonogram, then can we still find some predictable patterns where “ou” makes a sound other than /ow/?

• When does ou=/oo/?
  • ould = /oo/: would, could, should
• When does ou=/O/?
  • our = /or/: your, tour, four, pour, court, yours (exceptions: our, hour)
  • ou=/O/: soul (why?)
• When does ou=/u/?
  • ous at the end of a word = /us/: serious, nervous, famous
  • ou = /u/: young, touch, country, trouble (I don’t see any pattern here?)
• When does ou=/OO/?
  • ou = /OO/: you, soup, group, wound, route, youth (I don’t see much of a pattern here?)

Then there are the crazy “ough” words:

• ought = /o/: ought, thought, bought, sought, brought
• ough = /uf/: rough, tough, enough
• ough = /of/: cough
• ough = /O/: though, dough
• ough = /OO/: through