to think children should be taught to read and to form letters before being given spellings tests?

[26minutes]

Ds2 who has just started yr1 now has weekly spellings tests. I think it's crazy enough as it is that a 5 year old is having to do this, I don't remember spellings tests until I was in the equivalent of year 4. But to make matters worse he cannot read, so therefore it makes it more difficult to learn to spell words. The phonics that schools now teach are stopping him from being able to learn to read as he tries to 'sound out' every word that is put in front of him. Would it not be a good idea to teach children to read properly first?

On top of that, he hasn't yet been taught to form letters. So for instance a and e he does in a really odd way, he doesn't seem to be able to 'unlearn' the way he does it.

Now I'm not expecting the school to do everything with him, I understand that that is part of my role as a parent as well, and I do do a lot with him. I can't teach him to read though as I have no idea how to unteach phonics. During the summer holidays I started teaching him words the 'old fashioned' way, i.e. showing them to him and teaching them to him. He was learning about 5 words at a time and learning them after only seeing them twice, words he had learnt at the start of the holidays he still knew 7 weeks later when he went back to school. Now though that he's having phonics drummed back into him he looks at them, tries to sound them out and gets confused and stressed so I've stopped. In year R he had only learnt 40 out of 100 words that they are supposed to know by the end of yrR, although many of them he didn't really know imo. I've sat with him trying to help him with form letters but any breakthrough I do seem to have is wiped away the next day after school.

The school say he is well ahead of where he would be expected to be - his work is what would be planned for the end of yr1, so he is 2 terms 'ahead' but I am struggling to understand why 1. spellings tests are a good idea for a 5 year old and 2. why they are not taught to read and write before they are taught to spell.

get him to watch alphablocks. it is great lol

I agree that spelling tests are daft for children who can't read and write. My boys' school is also expecting them to pick up the correct way to form letters through luck, as they are not showing them.

My year 2 son was taught cursive straight away in reception, but then in year 1 the teacher went back to "printing with flicks".

My year 1 son (who was only 5 at the end of August) gets five spellings a week. At the end of reception he had to do these by spelling them out to the teacher who would write them down, as he couldn't write then.

I taught him to write over the holidays.

I do hate to sound like a geriatric old fart, but we went to school as 'rising 5's' (ie in the term when you turned 5) and most oddly we could knew our alphabets, tables and read reasonably well (by todays standards) and spelling tests every Friday morning were the norm.

'shock, horror' my children could do the same.

You couldn't learn to read without acquiring phonetic knowledge, though. Learning words as pictograms (look and say) is only likely to work for the first few hundred, maybe a couple of thousands words - and then what?

I'm not sure what 'reading' is if part of it doesn't involve knowing which letters are in which words - maybe then they think spelling will help him learn to read? That is how people used to learn to read, by sounding out the words and then spelling them over and over (eg. saying 'f, a, t, h, e, r' ... 'fa-ther').

I don't know if that makes sense but just trying to show there could be method to what the school is doing.

i think that a large part of the problem is that if we haven't been specifically taught phonics (i for one only remember refusing to sound out the phonic sounds of the alphabet at infant school, and because I could already read very well for my age at that point, my mum agreed with me), when we do sound out words, we don't even realise that's what we're doing.
But we don't sound them out letter by letter, or even by diphthong (i mean like with ou, th, au etc) , we break down the word into syllables, most likely.

Yes, I agree nickel. I had this conversation with my dad a few weeks ago - he was convinced he learned to read entirely by looking at words and memorizing them, with no phonetic imput. I did eventually convince him that he just learned the rules subconsciously, but it took a while! Back when I learned to read it was very obvious that learning phonics (which my mum taught me as the school failed to teach using look and say) was the very, very slow route. But as I understand it, it pays off later. I get the impression it's a problem when children get frustrated by how slow it is and want to dash ahead, maybe?

morecrack. I'm not asking them to teach him differently to the rest of the entire school, I'm asking them to acknowledge the fact that he simply doesn't get phonics and help him out insteasd of drumming them into him. Looking at your post there's a lot of words that can't be 'sounded out' - 'taught', 'sight', 'to' being just a few of them. They have acknowledged that he gets extremely stressed out when doing the words because he can't read them, but brush off my concerns with him struggling with phonics.

itsnearly.. out to me isn't spell phonetically, people who can read know that 'ou' makes the 'ow' sound but to a child who doesn't understand phonics and hasn't learnt that sees the o and u seperately, so to him it can't be sounded out. The same with th. He sees that as 2 seperate sounds, not one,

slaveto... I've tried to explain that there are some words that can't be sounded out, but obviously he can't tell this just from looking at a word. If I'm doing it with him, I give him a chance to see if he knows the word, usually he will try sounding it out, so I tell him that this is a word that can't be learnt that way and tell him the word, get him to repeat it back to me then come back to it at the end. But next time it will be the same. He can't distinguish between words that can be sounded out and words that can't. I don't expect him to at that age, but it feels to me that the phonics are just confusing matters no end for him.

Those of you who are saying about spellings being a way of learning to read, I get that now. The more you write a word down and think about how it is spelt is going to help you recognise the word when you see it written down.

Last year we were sent home words for them to learn to read, this year they only do that in school and it is the spellings that are coming home which I didn't realise. Yesterday his teacher had sent a list of words he needs to learn to move up to the next reading level. They are nothing like the spellings he has had. 'said', 'come', 'like', are some examples. None of them are spelt phonetically, so he reads them as 'sad' or 'sid', 'com' and 'lick'.

Obviously I've never learnt phonics. I learnt the alphabet as 'Ay', 'Bee', 'see', 'dee'.. not 'ah', 'ssss', 'd'. I could already read when I started school, and LRDs post has triggered a vague memory of the whole class sitting chanting "see, ay, tee, cat", "dee, oh, jee, dog" for example. Probably oversimplifying, but you get the idea, we never said 'c-a-t, cat'. I want to be able to help him out but as I don't understand it I can't. Thanks for the tips, I will see if he understands what a 'tricky' word is.

I think that's right - I remember being frustrated by having to "learn" these strange sounds when I already knew what the letters were and how they worked!

26 -this is just a vague thought, but I just put two things together from your posts and made 5. Some people really do find phonics much harder than others. It is one of the classic signs of dyslexia. I put that together with what you say about teh way he writes a and e, and it just sounds a little suggestive to me. Please don't take this as more than a vague impression, as I'm only getting a small snapshot and there may be nothing to it. But I thought I'd mention it.

Aside from dyslexia, it remains true that phonics isn't perfect for everyone. If your DS is good at memorising each word as if it were a picture, he may well find it frustrating. Other people (like me), would find it quite easy to sound out 'taught'. It's not that you can't use phonics to do that - it's that phonics is complicated.

Sorry if this has been covered, but how much have you got from the teacher about this?

(Btw, dyslexia is a bee in my bonnet so I see signs of it everywhere - it's just that it reminds me how we all learn quite differently and what works for one person may not be what is working brilliantly for the other children in the class.)

26 - maybe you should get him a copy of the Ladybird Key words reading scheme flashcards and learn all those together - most of the other words he can sound out - the Key wordsare the most common owrds in the english language, and if he can learn those by rote, then it'll free up his brain power for learning the other ones phonically.

LRD, "we all learn quite differently and what works for one person may not be what is working brilliantly for the other children in the class". Exactly. You've said it in a much better way that I have. Re, your thoughts on dyslexia, that's not something I've ever looked into with him, he has behavioural problems, possible ADHD, CAMHS have said that it's possible/probable, but they won't begin assessments until he's 7. I have read, not sure if it was a thread on here or a link from here that children with ADHD are one of a group for whom phonics doesn't work because they can't process it (or something along those lines) is that the same with dyslexia?

Yes, he's one that can look at a word and remember it, that's how I was doing it in the summer, showing and telling him a word, he got it after a couple of times, often just once, and was still remembering the words 7 weeks later.

I've spoken with his deputy recently about quite a few matters, more behavioural based than anything, but his getting stressed about spellings, phonics, reading etc was a topic that came up - he also gets migraines, so I want to minimise any stress or worry for him as much as possible in case this is a trigger. This was when I found out that he was quite far ahead of 'national average' upon finishing year R, and from discussing colours and levels with ds1 it seems that he is level 1C, on the cusp of 1B, so almost at the level they are expected to be at when completing yr1. I think this may be why nothing has triggered with the school until my meeting last week.

Thanks nickelbabe I will have a look for them tomorrow.

To me it sounds like his reading has got ahead of his phonic ability. During year 1 the class will spend a lot of time working on the phonemes - ow, th, sh, ar, etc, and once he recognises that certain combinations of letters make special sounds then I think he will be fine. At the moment he is trying to read words containing the more advanced phonemes, without the knowledge of how to decode them, which is bound to be frustrating.

This website : www.lancsngfl.ac.uk/curriculum/literacy/lit_site/lit_sites/phonemes_001/ lists the 44 phonemes in the english language. You could use this to help him see that many of the words he is finding difficult can be decoded. So, for example, if he reaches the word "out" you say "OK - o and u together make an "ow" sound - so ow-t..." or for the word "like" you say "There is a silent e on the end of the word and that makes the i say "eye" - so l-eye-k". He will cover this in school over the course of the year though.

My son (now in Yr 2) does the weird letter formation thing too. I think he knows what the letter is supposed to look like, but can't quite work out how to get it onto paper....

I don't know much about ADHD, but I do know it's not uncommon to be diagnosed with both. IMO many diagnoses (certainly dyslexia) are a 'best fit' description in any case.;

Poor love that he's getting migraines. I do think it's tricky when a child is doing really well - without meaning to, school may not be doing as much for a bright child struggling as a less able child struggling, because the struggle is less obvious (if that makes sense!). But you clearly see there is something he's finding a pain.

It is thought that dyslexics often struggle with phonics, but the usual argument is that you need to persevere, because they actually need it more than other children who learn the rules with less effort. Sorry, I know that may sound a bit useless, but I think phonics does have long-term benefits.

(Just a minor thing, but 'the 44 phonemes in the english language' is a bit of a matter of opinion. Depending on things like accent/how acute your hearing is, you may hear more or less than 44 ... this is why it gets so complicated!)

Phonics first, fast and only is the way to go initially. The Clackmannshire research actually had to be abandoned because it was considered (rightly) unethical to disadvantage the control group (of children) so much.

Of course phonics should be and IS taught alongside other strategies, and "tricky words" are built in to the program.

DD was caught in the crossover and lost all confidence in her ability to build words up using phonemes.

Firstly spelling tests should not be seen as a competition. They are mostly a way to see who needs what help - not who is winning.

As for phonics I have doubts about that method - at least if applied to everyone regardless.

People seem to be saying that you have to use phonics to sound out the words and the alternative is to learn all the words in the language by rote which apparently isn't possible.

Well my first problem with that is that I learned to read before they invented the new method, so it can't be as black and white as that.

As for being able to sound out all words that is only partly the truth isn't it. If you encounter the word 'false' or 'knife' etc for the first time there are no rules which on their own allow you to know for certain how to say it. You always fall back on being told how to say it by someone who already knows.

onegar - sorry, no, it is pretty much as black and white as that.

You learned to read by learning phonics subconsciously. That doesn't mean you didn't learn phonics.

(Btw, the 'new method' is actually an old method (a couple of thousand years old) given a revamp. The idea of learning words by look and say is much newer and, historically, an anomaly.)

the "like" thing is why they should bring back Words and Pictures!
that's how I learned that the magic e made the i longer.

agree with LRD on the 44 phonemes - you only have to cross the north/south devide and you've got at least 2 more for your books!

LRDTheFeministDragon, and how did I know how to read/spell 'knife'?

(and why if that list features "regional variation" for Farst, does it not list Fast in the line next to cat? just to clear it up a bit....)

onegar - probably the same way other people did at the time? I know it sounds like it but I'm not just pulling this out of a hat, people who learned like you have been studied extensively by psychologists and there is a consensus that phonetic processing is involved in normal learning to read, even the way you did it.

Some words will be learnt as pictograms - this is a great way to learn phonetically irregular words. Unfortunately, most of us can't learn enough words like this to learn the whole English language.

Other words we learn phonetically, building up a very complex set of rules.

If you test an adult reading with fake 'nonwords', eg. 'knise', they'll make a stab at the pronunciation based on what the nonword reminds them of - both visually and in terms of the pronunciation of other, known words. It's actually really interesting to read about (IMO), because very often we don't even consciously know we are making any kind of phonetic interpretation of a set of letters, but our brains are doing it all the same.