I suspect that this is quite a standard combination in schools and (pace Catflap) I've thought it's fine to mix phonics with books that encourage some guessing of words from the context of pictures. But, after nearly half a term of Jolly Phonics and books without words, DD1 proudly brought home her first ORT book with words last night. We snuggled up together and she started to sound out the first word of her first ever reading book:
"wer-her-o....wer-her-o....wer-her-o....I can't get it Mummy"
"It's a tricky one. You just have to know it. It's 'who'."
In a book with barely a dozen words there was 'spaceman' (not really even guessable from the picture), 'no', words that included sounds learnt at the very end of Jolly Phonics ("er" in "Kipper") or not at all (a soft "y" at the end of "Floppy" rather than the hard "y" at the start of "yoghurt" and words with tricky double constanants "Kipper", "Biff"). I'm not particularly bothered about DD1 as I think she'll probably learn to read come what may and I recognise how attractive the ORT books are, but it is rather odd that so many schools are using two schemes that simply don't mesh at all. An entirely phonics based scheme would be dull in the long term, but even a few weeks of pure phonics (perhaps with a handful of key sight words) would build on the base of Jolly Phonics so carefully acquired by Reception children.
Our plan is to go with ORT but also read the phonetic "Bob Books" with DD1 so that she has the experience of reading books that she can actually read.
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Jolly Phonics and Oxford Reading Tree
51 replies
Issymum · 18/10/2005 09:32
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