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?

Clearly your Ds has some SEN. I’d strongly advise you ensure he has a full cognitive screening from an educational psychologist, which would look at your DSs strengths and weaknesses, also they would give his teacher and yourself appropriate advice on how best he will be able to learn.

@SueSuddio my DD was reading books far beyond what the school had lassoed her into eg lemony Snicket and she was on Oxford reading tree 7 or something utterly boring and ridiculous for her.
At parents evening they said can you help mini yes to read fluently eg she reads out loud like c...a...t...*.

When I asked DD she said she was doing what she thought they wanted 🤣🤣 she could read far more advanced books fluently.

@Soontobe60 that's just not true and our literacy rates are embarrassing.

Phonics didn't work for so many children and even though on threads like this people who have gone through this say their DC took off with reading once they ditched phonics, they've ignored.

Phonics has become a cult

Mine all learnt to read (as I did) with look and say at home with me. They were all reading fluently well before school age.
They loved the Jane and Peter books because they could read the whole books themselves very quickly. I remember ds aged about 2.5yo (and he has ASD and ADHD so concentration wasn't his best) reading all the way through 2a very seriously and not wanting to stop. They're long books, but he was so excited that he could read the whole book.

I had a pile of flashcards and we started off going through the flashcards (I always started with mummy, daddy and their name) and then started by adding about one a day, but they very quickly would come and ask for particular words. Dd1 could read all the colours before she could recognise the colour - I was convinced she was colourblind (she wasn't, just found reading more interesting than colours).
Then we'd play games: Treasure hunt (one word that they had to read and follow, so they'd go window go to the window and find the one that said bed etc with a little prize at the end) One card to read on every stair going up. Matching word to picture. Give the flashcards to put on the right object etc. As far as they were concerned they were playing a fun game.
Dd2 used to love to read to her dolls - she was particularly good at reading upside down and I've a lovely video of her aged nearly 3yo surrounded by her dolls showing the pictures as she read to them with the book held carefully so it was right way up for the dolls.

I found when they did phonics at school they just then found them pretty obvious and were very quickly working out the ones they hadn't done from their reading knowledge.

I learnt to read with whole word and did not get phonics for a long time. I was reading Lord of the Rings (more by determination than anything else because my big sister had told me it was a great book and I wasn't being left out!) when it clicked - all those long names were what did for me. I remember it suddenly making sense.

But really. Most of the time you are reading by recognition. Whcih si why yuo fnid raednig tihs aesy. Phonics is useful for working out the words you don't know, which is why it's very helpful for them to know, but they can still read a lot without them.

I’m an English teacher and I’ve hated phonics as a way to teach my DC to read. It’s so so boring and repetitive. I took matters into my own hands after a term of Year 1 and so little progress. Within 3 months she was free reading chapter books and has absolutely loved reading ever since. I am convinced this would not be the case had we trusted the phonics taught by the school.

Phonics is a shit method, teach a kid a rule then list 10,000 exceptions- sight reading is so much better. Exposure to a wide variety of words.

My son lost two years of reading because teachers insisted on phonics..once they dropped the phonics he flew. At 12 he’s an exceptional reader.

@MyHeartyCoralSnail I used to listen to Yr1/2 children read as a volunteer. I remember opening a reading scheme book with a child one day, going through the phonics at the front of the book, then in the very 1st sentence of the book was a word which was an exception to the rule. I thought to myself, my goodness, no wonder some of these children are struggling with this!

I used this book to teach my 3-year old.
She is 4 now and reading fluently-yes, it is a very good book

Plenty of children learnt to read before phonics as an approach was invented so it surely can be done.

The main issue with sight reading is that it gets to a point where the cognitive load of remembering all the words outweighs the speed at which they can read and then they tend to get stuck unless they have worked out how to reverse engineer it phonically, which happens most of the time unless there is a reading disability like dyslexia. But this is thought to be why a phonics based approach is better for more children.

Some autistic children are gestalt processors meaning they struggle with the concept of breaking things into smaller chunks. And some children don't develop the ability to break words, specifically, down into chunks until they are older. DS2 could not really do this until he was nearly 7. Luckily for him he didn't have to start school/learning to read until he was 7 because it literally happened just in time. He was self-teaching all kinds of sight words before then though including some really long ones. Although he would get confused between words of a similar length starting with the same letter.

Can your DS recognise rhymes, and does he know what sound a word starts with? Those are the skills that DS couldn't do until he turned 7. Also known as phonological awareness. You can try playing games which break words down into smaller parts. I would recommend focusing on one or the other rather than both at the same time, as DS kept getting confused and thinking same-letter start meant rhyming and still gets stuck with this.

The other thing to do here is to get him to clap syllables. DS2 could do this but it didn't really help him with the other parts. (DH who is dyslexic still struggles with it, which surprised me).

Doh sorry, I didn't notice this was a zombie thread.

It didn't even occur to me that there were formal methods for teaching reading. Never heard of phonics or the suchlike. From infancy, teaching my kids to read and basic maths just seemed like a normal thing to do at the time. Sesame Street was brilliant!