Any primary teachers out there?

[ihearttc]

Not quite sure how to explain this so apologies if this doesn't make any sense?

Ive posted before about my DS who is in reception and the fact that we are having a bit of a struggle with him reading. Not the fact that he can't read because he can and can actually read quite well but he's having real issues with sounding out words and is just learning to read by recognising the words and he is doing absolutely fine that way but when he comes to a word that he doesn't know he just cannnot sound it out. He knows all his JP's and is on Level 4 ORT which he is sailing through but I get the feeling he cannot read anything more than that because he just isn't learning to read how school are expecting him to.

One of the words he got stuck on while reading a home book last night was:-brought and he had absolutely no idea of how to do it and quite honestly Ive got no idea how to help him. Are there sounds that they should be learning after the first 42 JP sounds and when should they be doing them? For example Ive taught him that words such as night,light,right,bright have the same ending and therefore make the same sound which he has grasped really well and can just read them with no problem but have no idea where to go from here so could someone please point me in the right direction!

Have spoken to his teacher who just says well he knows his sounds so he should be able to do it but words like brought don't work with all the JP sounds so am totally confused. Im not a teacher but it feels like Im having to teach him all this because Im not getting anywhere but Im so scared of doing it wrong.

Do some children just read by whole words and not by phonics and if so is that really bad?

[mrz]

I replied on your other thread and just realised you say he's being taught using JP & then given ORT books to read. The problem is ORT aren't phonic reading books and they introduce words like brought before he has the skills and knowledge to read them.
There are 42 phonemes/sounds taught in JP but these 42 can be written in 150+ ways and the next stage is for him to be taught the alternatives. I would have expected the school to be doing this already to be honest.

[NoahAndTheWhale]

I'm not a primary teacher (although I was once in the dim and distant past, but it was with year 5).

My DS is in year 1 and he reads in a pretty similar way to your DS - he has never done much sounding out and is a "whole words" type of reader from what I can see. At this time in reception he was on ORT stage 3 I think and had a sudden spurt at some point in maybe first term of Year 1 when he went from reading each word individually to suddenly reading fluently, if that makes sense.

I suppose I haven't needed to work out how to help him with words he couldn't work out as it suddenly happened.

I can see something similar happening with DD who is in a mixed nursery/reception class and has learned to read since starting there in January. She is probably more successful than DS at "sounding it out" but her sight vocabulary and then memory of other words to help her is increasing all the time.

Probably not very helpful but I think I do understand a little the sort of way in which your DS reads.