Has anyone else taught their child to read without phonics?

[Readingwithoutphonics]

For whatever reason (I suspect due to ASD we are waiting for assessment) phonics has not worked for ds. We’ve started to teach him word recognition. After nearly a year of no progress with phonics we have seen huge progress in just one month with learning words by sight. He can now read ‘The’, ‘it’ , ‘is’ ,’in’ , ‘on’ ‘a’ , ‘he’ and ‘she’, plus ‘cat’ ‘car’ ‘dog’ ‘hat’ and ‘bag’ .

Has anyone else done this ? I’m wondering now we have these words do I teach more or do I start to get him to read short sentences using just these and then see if he can make up his own sentences with them?

What is the point in doing this?
Genuine question. I’m in a similar position to OP regarding phonics teaching not working well for my child. Thanks.

Yea absolutely! You’ll probably find that you yourself learnt to read through word recognition. Most people age over about 25 who went to school in the UK will have learnt to read this way and we all seem to have managed ok! The English language has more phonetically irregular words than it does regular so many words need to be learnt by sight anyway. If you teach them to be able to recognise the first 100 most frequently used words (just google ‘100 high frequency words) then they will be able to read 50% of all books.

To help them learn to read.

Is it that the sign is a visual aid to help them remember?
I’d worry it would add complexity…something extra to learn…but maybe this is not the case at all?
I’ll look into it.

We didn’t do baby sign or anything, there weren’t many classes available at that tome
due to Covid we did a few at about 18 months -2 years but ds behaviour was so extreme it was a disruption to everyone else and he was distressed so we stopped

My home educated son couldn't get on with phonics at all. I switched to sight reading and he's now reading fluently. Different methods definitely suit different children.

Children, like adults learn in lots of different ways. I’m a teacher and think it’s a shame all children are taught the same way in school.

DC1 learned phonics and high frequency words but definitely learned to read more by look and say. She could read before starting school.

DC2 learned mainly by phonics and sounding out. Was confident with phonics and could do a little reading before starting school.

DC3 Learned phonics but has a very very good memory so I think would have learned by remembering most of the words. He knew all the letter sounds but wasn’t reading before he started school, 3rd child etc… but is the brightest of the three by far.

@LuckysDadsHat look at spelling mats and get a white board, they use magnetic spellings mat to first spell the word, repeat then get them to write on the white board.

What happens to those DC who don't have a parent to try different ways?

Lady bird books also a good shout.

I taught both DC to read using look and say - track down the old Ladybird books. It’s how we all used to learn to read.

I was actually looking at these last night is it the ‘read it yourself’ range? I might try them

You can't beat Peter and Jane!

I used these for my eldest. Despite how old fashioned they are, she came on ridiculously fast once I started using this “look and say” method. She’s neurodiverse with a really good visual memory and phonics just didn’t click for her. It did mean we sometimes had confusion early on with similar “looking” words eg if both started and ended with a tall letter, but that sorted itself out relatively quickly. It also gave us the weird situation where her younger phonics taught sibling could sound out brand new words well before my eldest, who was still unable to tackle a completely unfamiliar word at 9 or 10. But once she was told it once, she knew it, so her reading age was always fine. Like all things, it eventually clicked and by secondary she understood phonics. But what the “look and say” method did for us was meant she was able to read well through primary school where I think she otherwise might have struggled.

Interestingly, her times tables worked in the same way for her. Once I wrote them out and stuck them on her wall, she knew them. This might be worth considering in later years if your child is very visual.

Yes Peter and Jane! That’s what I used. It’s pretty dated now. But it works.

My autistic daughter was taught to read at school with phonics. It did work, I think but for a period she thought reading was sounding out, so for example, she thought you read car as c-ar. The teacher would complain and I’d think - well you did teach her to do this.

I agree. I taught my dd vertical addition & subtraction and she got it immediately, but her teacher had a right go at me because she shouldn't have been doing that yet, she should have been using a number line. Which didn't make sense to her and she kept making mistakes. This was a kid who at three could mentally share a bag of 12 sweets for three people and come up with the right answer.

There is a book called how to teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons. It is pretty good. Very easy to use as the parent.

My school does a whole-word reading intervention for older children for whom phonics-based interventions did not work. (I think it's called precision teach?) Phonics is definitely not the only way. I'm not a teacher, but as a parent I would certainly start with him learning the high-frequency words and common exception words and seeing how that goes. Schools normally want these memorised anyway.

My expectations of schools and reading is to take it into your own hands. The end aim here is to get them to actually read and be engaged. If that means they fail the phonics tests so be it.

A while ago as all mine are young adults now. We used the ladybird Peter & Jane bokks, same as my parents used on us. All reading early & still great bookworms now. This was before phonetics became the in thing for teaching reading.

My 22yo son learned to read with sight words because his school resisted phonics until they were forced to teach them. It meant that he could read the word “mother” but if you showed him “moth” or “mothering” he wouldn’t have a clue what they said. He would have been much better off learning with phonics and didn’t really click with reading until he was into Junior school.

My 18yo son was taught using phonics (at the same school) and it was an utter disaster. He could sound out the name of the letters but couldn’t do the synthesis part so he would say “c…a…t” over and over again but couldn’t put the sounds together to make the word “cat.” He would have done so much better with the sight words approach.

So I think you’re definitely right to use the method that’s most suited to your child. Lots of adults were taught to read with sight words using the Peter and Jane, Village with Three Corners, or old Biff, Chip and Kipper books and managed with no issues. I think phonics makes it much easier to decode unfamiliar words but I don’t see why it has become the only method used to teach reading. Even with phonics, you still have “tricky words” that you have to memorise because they can’t be sounded out.

My children had great success with the Reading Eggs app. One had hyperlexia and learned to read using the old Peter and Jane books before starting school. He struggled a bit with phonics in school but he got there in the end with them.

DS (diagnosed with ASD aged 7) was reading fluently before he started school. I'd never even heard of phonics. He was one of those children who constantly asked questions, including pointing to every sign and poster when we were out and about asking what everything said. That led to some very embarrassing moments in our very small and quiet GPs waiting room, I can tell you!
He's an adult now and I'm very envious of his photographic memory. I guess that helped with his reading skills as a child.

Try Usborne Very First reading books, and look for similar in your library. Get a stash and then read again and again every night, in a month my DS is so much better and losing the phonics sounding out thing which I could see was actually holding him up.

I'm believing more and more in word recognition as I read this thread. I taught myself to read French fluently in my 20s and this was done through just reading lots of different books and getting confident over the years, no fancy method.

My dd couldn't do phonics at all (she has a type of dyslexia). We are in the USA and they start reading a little later here than in the UK, but she was way behind at age 5, but by 7 had caught up and surpassed her peers. She really liked picture books and graphic novels (library is good for this as they can get expensive to buy) and I made a big point of not pushing her to read books without pictures or that were considered more her age level. I read a lot to her as well. In high school and sometimes at University she got the audiobook version of assigned texts as she couldn't read fast enough to keep up with the class. She is now 22 and just graduated university with a degree in Philosophy which was very intensive with reading and writing.

You’ve got your analogy mixed up. Taught correctly, synthetic phonics ensures the overwhelming majority of children will be able to read successfully by the end of KS1. It’s the exact equivalent of teaching children how to count before teaching them how to multiply.
If children are taught a purely word recognition method, it would take years and years before they can learn all the words they need.
Children who struggle with phonics often have an element of SEN / dyslexia.