Yet another reading question?

[ihearttc]

Just wondered if anyone could help?

DS started reception in september and is doing well with his reading...his school don't seem to do ORT but he is on blue level books if that helps at all. He is quite confident with his reading and knows all his JP sounds but is having difficultly with separating the sounds in words if that makes any sense? For example in the word "Fetch" he would sound out F E T C H rather than F E T CH...its like he can't see them when they are in with other letters.

They've got these lists of words to learn and he is on the one from last that they apparently have to learn by the end of reception and it seems like he just looks at a word and remembers it but can't seem to do the mecanics of sounding all the bits of longer words out...if that makes any sense at all?

Am not worried about it as I know he'll get it eventually and he's happy and doing well at how he is doing it but just wondered if there are some children that just can't learn to read that way. I spoke to his teacher before christmas about it and she said to just keep covering up bits of the word and get it to do it that way which I have been doing but its getting to a point now where he is flying along reading something and then just gets totally stuck and guesses the word rather than even try to sound it out...but then if the word is on the next page he'll remember it and he'll know that word after that.

Any thoughts if anyone can make any sense of that at all? I would speak to his teacher again but she is off sick after having an op for 3 months and they've got a supply teacher in who is lovely but doesn't often teach reception so wanted to pick your brains first!

[DilysPrice]

I can't speak on the subtleties of educational theory, (I'm sure lots of other people will) but I did find the Ladybird Phonics books good on the blended/multi-letter phonics sounds - each little story focusses on a different sound - starting with "a" and going all the way up to "ight".
I can still recite "This is the man who chops the chips at the Tip Top Fish and Chip Shop" in my sleep.

But January of reception is very early to be worrying about it anyway.

[fabhead]

My ds exactly same stage exactly same thing can sound out individual letter so could do C A T for example but can't blend or whatever it is called for th ch etc. We had parents evening yesterday and I asked the exact same q and got exactly same response: they are doing fine it's very early days, chill. basically they've only had 1 term and haven't got to this stage yet I think.

[ihearttc]

Thank you-yes someone else has said that the ladybird phonics books are good so might have a look at them.

As I said Im not worried about it at all...he is doing well and is happy which is the main thing but was just curious as to whether anyone had experienced this before and whether there was any ways in which to make it easier for him.

[ihearttc]

Thanks fab-yes he can sound out cvc words such as cat,dog,in,it etc but what Im noticing is that he can easily memorise high frequency words for example on the list he had this week was the word People which he has learnt but he can't sound out words which are actually much easier than that like Shop,Fetch,Such etc.

Am probably exaplaining this totally wrong but it seems that DS is almost a visual learner so far rather than a mechanical learner (if that makes sense?) and his word recognition is very high compared to his abilty to decode words.

[fabhead]

again, mine is exactly the same - reading by memory not the technique. I really dont know what it all means but I do know that this is exactly the way I learnt to read. I suspect that the whole phonics thing is a catch all lowest common denominator that works for most children. But there will always be variations and different ways of doing it I suppose.

This could all be bollocks, am not a teacher, someone more knowledgeable will come along I'm sure. Just seems to me that at just 5 they are doing amazingly just to be reading, however they are doing it. The european kids arent even in school yet etc etc

[ktee1]

I echo the messages that it is very early to be worrying and it sounds to me as if he is at a perfectly good level for his age. To be blending words is great at his age, the th, sh, ch are often taught alongside initial letter sounds (all depending on the phonics programme used by the school) but to not be noticing them in words at this stage is perfectly normal. Children learn to read in lots of different ways and they will often learn those 'trickier' words like the example you gave of people far easier than simple words like an on in! You sound like you are enjoying reading and sharing books with you son, which at his age is the perfect thing to be doing.

[lisata]

iheartc
You need to explain to your DS that a sound can be made from more than one letter. This is a hard concept but absolutely critical if he is ever going to spell!! Playing word games are an excellent way to explain this sort of concept to kids.

e.g. word building - You can create a set of cards with : sh f i ch p o
Create a set of pictures of a ship, chip, chop, shop (write the correct word on the back)

put a few of the sound cards out and a picture (obviously include the sounds for the word).
Ask the child to listen to the sounds.
Get them to put them in order.
As a prize they get to turn the card over and check it.
They love doing this and I bet within a few games he will have the concept under his belt.

Games and fun are the best way to build confidence.

Fabhead

One of the really important points about teaching kids the phonic code is that you are giving them the skills to do spelling later.

I personally had excellent visual memory (photographic memory it is sometimes called). I learnt to read via look and say (learning whole words) at the age of 3. My spelling was atrocious and I really only conquered it as a young adult.

In some ways your comment about lowest common denominator is true. ALL kids can learn to read via phonics - only small percentage have very good visual memory and can learn automatically. The kids who learn this way are actually learning the phonic code but the work it out for themselves (as I understand it we can only remember the shape of about 2000 words). This is why some kids who start out learning to read fine via whole word reading suddenly start to struggle at the age of 7 because they have reached the limit of the number of words they can remember and they haven't worked out any other strategies for themselves.

My mum is one of the founders of phonic books (dandelion readers). She is very into decodable texts. Have a look at their blog for some more links to information about phonics - phonicbooks.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/should-beginner-readers-use-only-decodable-books/#more-5 0

[thegrammerpolicesic]

But the OP is not worrying so please all stop telling her not to worry. She is asking questions about it as she is curious and wanting to encourage him in a way that suits his thinking/ learning style.

As discussed on the other thread Iheart, my ds is similar in that he eats up sight words - I find it quite amazing. Sometimes he gets the blends e.g. th, ch, sh he is ok with now but not the vowel ones as much - this seems to take him much longer than the sight word learning.

It is actually quite interesting looking at different learning styles isn't it?

Ds seems to be stuck with magic - e words at the moment so I guess that all children, at every stage have little stumbling blocks that they need to get over to move to the next stage?

[thegrammerpolicesic]

Interesting stuff lisa.

Not saying all of you were saying 'don't worry' by the way.

[fabhead]

lisa great post, very interesting. I wish you and your mum could come round and explain phonics to me. I too have (or had pre-pregnancy!) a photographic memory and learnt to read with look and say (though had no idea that is what it is called). I don't really remember having any trouble with spelling but I suppose I use a lot of mnemonics to do it rather than any technique other than just remembering spellings. Ds1 who is 5 is my first and I suppose I did kind ofthink the whole phonics thing was a bit of OTT, possibly, as I don't really understand how to apply it for all the words that don't work if you see what I mean. I will defintely look at your mum's blog. I suspect ds1 is like me in terms of how he is doing it, by memory, but interesting what you say about spelling and stumbling blocks later on. He definitely does not seem to be getting the 2 letters make a sound thing yet and can only just do c-a-t really, but somehow seems to be able to read the whole book in the evenings normally, I guess because they have gone through it once already in class. Some in the class, on th eother hand, can sound out most words at ORT2 (where most of them are at I think) but maybe can't get through the whole book. Interesting stuff, maybe I will try the game you suggested. Though, as I myself said earlier, they have only had one term so may just leave him alone and see how he gets on.

[ihearttc]

Thanks grammer-At least Im making some sense lol!! I probably shouldn't have used those words as examples to be honest cause like your DS most of the time he can get the th,ch and sh ones if he thinks about it but its more the vowel ones that he just can't seem to do no matter how long he looks at the words whereas with sight words he almost has to just look at it once to remember it.

Lisa-thats very interesting thank you. But how has teaching changed over the last 20 or so years because when I was at school we didn't learn to read phonetically (or at least I didn't) or is it that it was just done in a different way to how its done now?

If a visual learner knows these 2000 or so words then wouldn't they then be able to work out other words from that anyway?

Apologies if none of that makes any sense at all-its all very confusing lol!

And no Im honestly not worried about it at all-Im just very curious as to the differences between different types of learning.

[ZephirineDrouhin]

Interesting thread. It suggests to me the importance of a flexible approach in teaching reading to accommodate children like the OP's ds. But perhaps this is easier said than done in a classroom setting.

I'm having trouble getting to grips with the idea that phonics are good for spelling. I can see how this would work in a language like Italian where pronunciation and spelling generally follow fairly simple rules, but how does this work in English which is such a mongrel language with its roots all over the place? How duz fonics help them lern werds like skool, bred, cheez, mutha, sellery etc etc

Can anyone explain?

[ZephirineDrouhin]

lisa - sorry I hadn't read your post properly. Really interesting stuff, especially about phonics serving the greatest number of pupils and the age 7 ceiling for visual recognition. Is this quite a common thing? Intuitively one would expect that by the time they had learnt that many words they would start discerning patterns in the relationships between the way words are sounded and spelled, but perhaps not so for all children.

Can you shed any light on how phonics help with spelling?

[ihearttc]

Thats exactly what I thought Zephirine-that if by the age of 7 they had 2000 words then surely they'd be able to work out any new ones from that...as I said Im sure thats how I learn to read! I cannot remember sitting in a class doing ants on arms and stuff that DS did at the start of the year.

There is a phonics workshop at DS's school on friday so am going to see what they say about it. Its only really come to light since christmas so didn't get a chance to speak to his teacher before she left to go into hospital and his supply teacher is lovely but hasn't ever taught reception before so not sure how much "teaching to read" she knows.

[princessparty]

this is what I do
write a list of say, words with the 'sh' sound in down one sode of a piece of paper eg dish ,shop,fish, sheep, push etc or in our case white board .On the other side little sketches illustrating the wordssof the words- but not in the same order,
First i have her go down the list trying to spot the 'sh' sounds and draw a circkle round the 'sh' bit.Then she goes down the list and sounds out the word (the sh is circled so she knows to treat it as one sound) and join it up to the relevant picture.Then be amazed at her cleverness !!
Works a trat with reception aged DD

[doodledrawers]

This is a really interesting thread - I was discussing reading methods with DH last night, as I'm sort of conducting a one boy reading experiment with DS1 (6)! He's in a Welsh medium school (our village school) so is learning to read in Welsh, using a phonics system - much easier in Welsh, as it's a far more consistent language than English, and he's flying through his reading books. They don't do English reading in school until they're 8, but as we're an English speaking household most of DS's books at home are in English. He's really keen to read English, so because I don't want to cause any confusion with Welsh stuff that's pronounced differently we're just using the "whole word" method with English. That's how I learnt to read, and we seem to have similar brains (good memories!), and he's doing really well so far with that method too.

I'm finding the whole biligual thing fascinating and have no idea how he does it! There's obviously a lot of compartmentalising going on. For example, at the weekend he had "tractor" on his spelling list from school (it's the same in Welsh & English!) and he managed to read and spell it with no problem, but when he came across it that evening in an English book he didnt recognise it as he hadn't seen it in English before - bizarre!

Can I just point out I adore my son and care very much about his education, in case it's coming across that I view him as some sort of scientific study!

[ihearttc]

Lol doodle-I have an image of you in a little white coat and clipboard writing things down while he does them!!

It is really interesting isn't it and something I hadn't even thought of before-I just assumed that DS would learn to read using phonics and that would be that but they do like to surprise us don't they?!!

I completely agree with english being a complicated language to learn...does welsh have the same sort of "rules" (for want of a better word!) as english like silent e etc?

[weegiemum]

My dd2 is in p2 (y1) and has struggled a bit with multi-letter phonics - but suddenly she "go" it just before Christmas.

It seemed to be down to 2 things -

1. Cutting up words into sounds
   
2. Writing out words with the sounds in different colours "find a sound and write it in green" sort of thing.
   
   Both of these were part of homework and since then she has been great.
   
   Dd1 is 10 (next week! eeek what happened to my baby?) and she still struggles a bit with spelling with multi-letter phonics (not in English) and I have found getting her to do the same exercises as dd2 (though not when d2 or ds are about!!) has helped a lot.

[weegiemum]

actually, she "got" it. G - o - t, got!

[witchwithallthetrimmings]

Does anybody know how the Dr Seuss type scheme fits in. Seems to be a half way house between learning words and phonics. Each section teaches a sound like "all" or "op" or ight
we all fall off a wall, we all are tall, no we all are small
etc.

[doodledrawers]

Generally in Welsh letters are always pronounced the same way eg "c" is always a hard c like in cat. A ^ is used to lengthen some vowels, but that's about it. To English eyes some of the letter combinations look / sound odd - ch, ll, rh etc. And some of the pronounciations are totally different - "f" is pronounced like v, and "ff" gives the f sound, and "dd" is sort of like an English "th". Which is why I'm avoiding English phonics!! But once you know the pronounciations they are far more consistently applied in Welsh. And as with everything, it's far easier to learn at 5 than 35!

[Tinuviel]

Phonics is great but it will only take you so far in English as it's not a completely phonetic language. Eg here, were, where. So inevitably we all do a certain amount of 'whole word recognition', which certainly gets them speeding through books early on and as long as they pick up the phonics on the way, it won't slow them down when they reach their 'capacity'.

I used a mixture of phonics and look/say with mine and it has worked really well. That doesn't mean that it would work for every child! Some really need the early emphasis to be on phonics. But if he's managing on whole word recognition, I wouldn't push the phonics too much - he'll grasp it in his own time.

[ZephirineDrouhin]

Tinuviel, that sounds completely sensible. Ultimately, readers always use a combination of whole word recognition and phonics, so the question is whether it is better for children to start with one or the other or be introduced to both from the beginning.

I still can't help feeling that to completely ignore whole word recognition in favour of exclusively teaching phonics in such an irregular language as English could potentially hinder a child's ability to learn to spell, but have no experience in this and would be interested to know what others think.

doodledrawers - fascinating about your ds's Welsh/English phonics/whole word experience and the compartmentalising.

[lisata]

Wow what a lot of responses didn't expect that!

iheartc you said:

Lisa-thats very interesting thank you. But >how has teaching changed over the last 20 >or so years because when I was at school we >didn't learn to read phonetically (or at >least I didn't) or is it that it was just >done in a different way to how its done now?

Firstly phonics is not phonetics. Phonetics was a system taught in the early 70's where they taught kids a special alphabet (ITA) in order to try and teach them spelling. There is a great article about it here news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1523708.stm
It didn't work and as a result there was a huge backlash against phonic approaches (which had been used up until then in the UK I think).

Educators started focusing on whole word reading "look and say". "Peter and Jane" did this with a very structured look and say method which introduced a few words at a time. Also there was a focus on multiple strategies - i.e. get kids to use the picture to guess, using repetitive words etc. Another whole lot of theorists said we need to focus on motivation - we must give kids real books which captivate them.

The problem is that the evidence from lots of studies shows that these methods also fail quite a large % of children. This is why the government (and it is now cross party)have said that phonics is the way forward because all children can learn to read this way. AND as a bonus it also creates the building blocks for learning spelling.

Phonics is about listening for sounds. The whole reason phonics helps with spelling is you should be able to hear the sounds in regular words even longer ones e.g. castanets can be sounded out.

English is a horribly complicated irregular language which is why it helps to understand the phonic code. There are 44 phonemes (sounds) in English. Many of the sounds can be spelt in lots of ways. For instance the /ee/ sound can be spelt five different ways (sweet, me, beach, key, pony ). In reception or year one you only learn a few of these as the kids get older you teach them all the different spellings for a sound.

I also find the real books motivation argument strange. What I love teaching kids to read with my mums books (and other decodable texts - I have used Ruth Miskins too) is that the kids are so confident because they never come across a word that they can't decode. They are taught all the skills they need - it becomes logical and managable and sucess breeds confidence. They love reading.

iheartc also said:
If a visual learner knows these 2000 or so >words then wouldn't they then be able to >work out other words from that anyway?

Yup some kids - like I myself did - work out the rules automatically from "whole word reading". However the ones that fail to read at 7 are the ones that haven't managed to do that. We currently have hundreds of thousands of kids in our schools who leave primary school unable to read. My mum was the head of a centre called the Bloomfield Learning Centre in London. They teach hundreds of so called "reluctant readers" to read using phonics ... their failure rate is miniscule almost zero. Phonics works for ALL kids and it gives them very useful skills for understanding how to spell words.

[lisata]

fabhead

Don't worry about what level your kid is at or what other kids are doing. Each kid progresses at their own level and they will get there. Some kids just are not ready developmentally. In other words things in their head just haven't finished growing yet (can be eye, ears, neurons). Kids learn in fits and starts!

Do the games but make it fun (I love all the games everyone has suggested - fabbydoosey). And always stop if they don't want to do it. Same with reading - you never need to finish the book. Try and do it little and often - easier said than done I know.

I have a little reception son (my baby) and he is born 2nd August. He just hasn't been ready to start ... so I just haven't really done much yet. I know he will catch up fine once we get going.

Lisa