“P is for Pterodactyl” and other considerations for the intelligent phonics teacher

Have you seen the latest publication from Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter? It’s called “P is for Pterodactyl” and by its own admission, it’s the worst alphabet book ever! Every single page is littered with a plethora of words known to English language users that fail the basic rules of synthetic phonics. The book, however, is one of my favourites. Beautifully illustrated by Maria Tina Beddia, it’s also a good belly laugh. For example, on the “T” page, the text reads “The charging tsunami washed away all of Tchaikovsky’s tchotchkes” (Haldar, Carpenter & Beddia, 2019). The cartoon image shows a rather flustered Tchaikovsky watching his grand piano being swamped by a huge wave, whilst an array of trinkets spill across the page. As an experienced early years teacher, I use books like this so young children can discover that English letters don’t have one sound but any sound can be written in a number of ways. The fidelity we might like to expect between sounds (phonemes) and their written representation does not exist when we explore English words in all of their (in)glorious incarnations. The complexity comes about because the English language has a mixed pedigree, using the 26 letters of the alphabet to make more than 40 phonemes through 120 different written combinations. As Campbell (2019) reminds us, the “number of phonemes and written combinations keep growing as foreign language words are adopted into the English language” (p. 70). The complexity doesn’t reside alone in big foreign words such as “tsunami”, “Tchaikovsky” and “tchotchkes”. More common everyday words such as “of”, “they”, “was”, “what” and “laugh” cannot be decoded using the basic rules of synthetic phonics.