Wordman blog • August 2026

Playing I Spy with my daughters

A few years ago, I was playing "I Spy" with my four-year-old daughter on the walk to the bus stop. Usually, we'd run pretending to be trains and planes with sounds and actions, but another dad had started a game during a playdate, and I felt self-conscious that maybe I wasn't keeping up. I decided it was time we gave it a try. "I spy with my little eye something beginning with G."

I cannot remember her exact guesses now. I remember that the answer in my head was grass, and that nothing she said seemed to get us closer.

I assumed she wasn't going to get it, so I changed the clues. I tried colours and shapes, then started giving her the first part of the word. She was "spying" too in no time. It was fun, and I was satisfied that I had done something vaguely educational.

At the time, her guesses felt like evidence that she wasn't ready. Looking back, I had not given her much chance. I had said gee, the name of the letter. A word such as jeep or jacket would have matched the sound at the beginning of my clue. Grass begins with a different sound. I had given her one clue and expected her to hear another.

When listening got her nowhere, she started naming other things she could see along the road. My extra clues helped her narrow the field. None of this looked systematic from the outside. It was just a dad and a four-year-old trying one thing, abandoning it and trying another while we walked to the bus.

I was not worried that she would never learn to read. I trusted that school would teach her, and I was ready to support whatever she needed. I was worried that another parent was doing something worthwhile with his child and I wasn't. Yet my daughter was doing far more thinking than I had noticed. Colours and shapes drew on words and meanings she already knew. Unfinished words asked her to listen more closely. She had not failed to understand the game. I had given her a clue that did not match the answer.

The sound I hadn't said

That moment came back to me after she started school. She was taught by fantastic teachers using a programme called Read Write Inc., which is based on systematic synthetic phonics. The terminology initially made the whole business sound more forbidding than it is. Watching her learn made the central idea much plainer: written letters and groups of letters represent the sounds in spoken words, and children learn to blend those sounds back into a word.

I had help making sense of it. My wife, Daisy, was training as a teacher and had become interested in the "Reading Wars", the long-running argument over how children should be taught to read. From talking with her and doing my own reading, I came to see that phonics was not a new educational fashion. Teachers had used forms of it for a long time. The systematic programmes were a more recent attempt to make that knowledge explicit and teach it consistently. Slowly, that first game came into focus.

Letter names matter, of course. They let us identify letters, recite the alphabet and spell aloud. But a letter's name and the sound it represents are not always the same. Gee names G; it does not tell a listener whether the word in my head begins like grass or giant. On that first walk, my daughter was not looking at a printed letter. She was listening for a piece of a spoken word. I needed to give her something she could actually hear in grass.

After I noticed the distinction, I started hearing it everywhere. Adults know letter names so well that we reach for them automatically. Children learning to read at school are still working out what each kind of information is for. In an oral game where the answer is grass, saying "gee" gives them the label for a letter when they need a clue they can hear.

Two daughters in the game

We carried on playing. A few years later, our younger daughter is four, the same age her sister was on that first walk. There are now two daughters in the game and considerably more argument about the rules.

The last time was in the car, when the girls had started getting noisy and fighting in the back. My eldest gave us "fff" and managed to stump everyone with fence, even though we could see it through the window. After five or ten guesses, she decided that stumping us meant she had earned another go. It was a fair interpretation of the rules, but her younger sister had been waiting for a turn. We explained that games sometimes need different rules when different people play. This took some negotiating.

When her turn finally came, my youngest gave us a sound that did not match her answer at all. I cannot remember the clue or what she claimed to have spied, only her lovely cackle when she told us. We all laughed and assumed she had been winding us up.

Our youngest starts school after the summer. She gets colours, shapes and longer pieces of words. I might give her "Something beginning with gra..." for grass. Her sister moves between letter names, individual sounds and larger chunks, depending on what she feels like using.

If I shouldn't say the letter name, what exactly should I say?

For a while, I thought the answer was that I had to learn phonics properly before we could play. I had discovered that individual sounds should be said cleanly. For m, that means "mmmm" rather than "muh". I did not know all of these sounds when we began. I added vowels without noticing, and I doubt I am the only adult who does.

My eldest has corrected my pronunciation more than once. She has had excellent teaching, and if I am unsure about a sound, I ask her. She is the household expert now.

I was mixing up two things: sounding out a written word and giving someone a clue in a spoken game. I know the individual sounds now, but you do not need to learn them all before playing. If you know the clean sound, use it. If you do not, choose your answer, start saying it aloud and stop after a piece your child might recognise.

Take b. At different times, I had made both kinds of mistake. "Bee" is the letter name. When I said "buh", I was adding a vowel to its sound. The sound represented by b in bat is short and clipped. "Ba..." is a larger chunk that includes the real vowel from the word. Both the clean sound and the larger chunk can be useful clues; "bee" is not something your child can hear in bat. In the same way, "bu..." works for butterfly. These spellings are only rough approximations, but the practical test is simple: offer something that is really present in the spoken word.

A whole syllable can work, as can a rhyme or half the word. Your child is still listening to parts of a word and working out how they fit together. To them, it can just be part of the game.

Nor does this mean that playing with letter names is wrong. A child who has learned enough of the system may be able to turn a letter name into the sound they need. My friend's child may simply have been ready to do that when mine was not. My eldest now uses letter names or sounds as she pleases.

If you do want to learn the individual sounds, the Read Write Inc. videos for parents and carers demonstrate them more clearly than they can be written down. Other teachers demonstrate their versions on YouTube, and your child may be happy to show you what they have learned at school.

None of this means every clue has to be about sounds. Colours, shapes and descriptions still count. If my youngest needs "It's green" or "It's beside the wall", I give her that. Once she is in the game, I can try a rhyme or leave a word unfinished. Plenty of good clues never mention a letter at all. "You drive this to school" makes her find the word first; the sounds only come once she has it. There is no test to pass.

Afterword

That was not the only word game that stayed with us. When my eldest was in P2, she came home wanting to play Hangman and used sounds as she worked out the words. I enjoyed playing it with her on paper, but I also looked for an app she could play by herself. I could not find one that worked the way I wanted, certainly not one without adverts or a subscription.

That is why I started building Wordman. Daisy created its characters and illustrations, and together we made the children's word game we had been looking for. This blog is partly how we hope people will find it. But we have also learned a lot while making the app, raising our daughters and trying to understand how children learn to read. Most of that is useful whether you ever download Wordman or not.

I am curious whether listening to her sister will give our youngest a different starting point, and what difference it will make that I know more myself. Our eldest has already changed the way I understand that first game. I am excited to see how both of them progress, what each finds easy and what else they make me reconsider.

If this was useful, the blog has more: letter names, letter sounds, and which to use when, and five phonics games for the car.